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Showing posts with label Riverside Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riverside Theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
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It's with a sneaking sense of shame that I confess I'd assumed this was going to be an adaptation of Richard III by men in drag. The clue as to what it is actually about is in the title 'Drag King' Richard III. This is a less-told story, the marginalised even within the marginalised: female to male transition.
The play, written by Dr Terri Power, is an examination of the transition of her friend Laurie/Laurence (Anne Zander) in the late 80s and early 90s. Told from the lesbian perspective 'La Femme' (Bonnie Adair), we see two characters explore gender roles; one with blush, lipstick and dresses, the other with hormones, scalpels and surgery. Framing all this is Shakespeare's paragon of self-loathing, Richard III. Power treats Richard's twisted, deformed husk of a body as a literary reflection of the 'wrongness' that compels transgender people towards transitioning.
With just two actors and a sparse set, the play has a tinge of the experimental. Though the underlying narrative of Laurence's thrums away in the background, we frequently digress into fragments of performance art, which slides back into a slice of Shakespeare for a couple of minutes before returning to a two personal confessional. The upshot is that you're never sure of your footing, the constant cycling through different modes, moods and intensities keeping us engaged. Consequentially, the shifting, occasionally fractured, dramatic structure reflects the themes of transition and metamorphosis inherent to the subject matter.
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| La Femme - Bonnie Adair |
At the heart of Drag King Richard III is the concept of gender as a social construct rather than innate biology. The idea of an intrinsic masculinity or femininity is an illusion; roles prescribed by societal conditioning as opposed to preordained by 'nature'. Power initially plays this in a minor key by showing her stage surrogate, usually dressed down in ripped jeans and a loose-fitting vest top, going 'femme' for a night out.
A woman putting on a dress, tights and a bit of make-up isn't exactly rocking the boat, yet even this subtle transformation gains power from the context. In pretty plain terms, we're shown how even adopting conventional gender norms sends out a complex tangle of social signals: she's up for it, she wants attention, she's looking for fun etc. If doing something as simple as this causes ripples, how does changing ones gender completely?
Given the depiction of Laurence it's like tossing hand grenades at your friends and family. The late 80s setting means that none of the characters have any idea how to approach the idea of a woman transitioning to a man, no support groups, existing advice to follow and no internet to consult. Further wrinkling things are that this is all taking place in Georgia - a state not exactly renowned for it's progressive stances.
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| Laurie/Laurence - Anne Zander |
So Laurence's parents, having just about managed to tolerate her coming out as gay, disown her altogether. Even her gay friends find the notion disconcerting - with the straightforward and fascinating observation that if they love a woman that becomes a man, does that make them heterosexual? It feels like everything is spinning outwards into recriminations and mutual suspicions, Laurence erecting barriers between himself, his friends, family and society in general, cauterising the amputated stump of her old gender by signing up to the US Military to take out his frustrations on the Middle East.
Kicking back against society's expectations of her as a woman, Laurence adopts hypermasculinity. He's angry, aggressively sexual and domineering - rasping through gritted teeth how he wants to "break" women. This is the weaponisation of gender, fashioning every expectation of of manhood into a club to beat us with. Zander is excellent casting for this role - her features are like a rack of razor blades, her blue eyes wide and confrontational, her body like a high tension cable. As she stalks the stage she makes eye contact with the audience - when she's locked on to you, you become a deer on a road at night transfixed by the car bearing down upon it.
Her command of Shakespeare is also deeply impressive, imbuing dialogue like "cheated of feature by dissembling nature / deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time / into this breathing world, scarce half made up" with spiky fervour, leaving us no doubts as to its relevance to the transgender experience. There's a clarity of vision to this performance, powerful confidence faintly leavened with a humanising tinge of self-doubt.
The a post-show discussion afterwards proved to be as fascinating as the play itself. Chaired by Del LaGrace Volcano, and featuring director Roz Hopkinson, the cast and Dr Powers they pick through what the meanings of contemporary gender. Volcano's mere presence is a perfect rebuttal to those with a deathgrip on the idea of gender as a strict binary, effortlessly straddling masculine and feminine.
The most illuminating part of the discussion was an explanation of why female-to-male transgendered people are marginalised compared to male-to-female. Volcano laid out that men like Eddie Izzard and Grayson Perry are considered 'brave' when they don feminine signifiers. The compelling argument was made that this bravery arises from the idea of consciously rejecting masculine privilege in favour of the 'lesser' femininity. Conversely, women seizing masculine privilege are seen as interlopers, unfairly occupying the positions of power. Zander explained that she saw this as a straightforward symptom of patriarchy - an analysis it's difficult to argue with.
As I left I had a mouthful of intellectual gristle to munch on. It's easy to march through life accepting that society is the way it is because it's the way it is. This is the unexamined life and it's boring as hell. Frolicking in fuzzy gender boundaries is a fantastic way to reveal your own ingrained prejudices, even if it is just donning a suit or a dress and heading out into the night. Drag King Richard III manages to do a hell of lot with very little time, telling a deeply felt personal story while getting into the nitty-gritty of wider gender issues. If you have an interest in trans rights, sociology or gender politics you should absolutely check it out.
Drag King Richard III is at Riverside Studios until 3rd August 2014. Tickets here.
All photography by Jamie Scott-Smith.
All photography by Jamie Scott-Smith.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
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For a play about an indecisive loser whose half-baked plans get everyone killed, William Shakespeare's Hamlet is actually pretty good. It's my favourite Shakespeare - which is perhaps a bit of a cliched choice - but I've always felt Hamlet is as incisive in 2014 as it was in 1614. Jealousy, anger, lust and guilt are part of the universal human condition, all fully realised in the sympathetic character of Hamlet. Who can't sympathise with putting off an important project as long as feasibly possible, hurting people you care about with casual lies or just straight-up being a bit dippy, morose and self obsessed?
It's this relatable psychology that makes Hamlet so malleable. From slight tweaks like Kenneth Branagh's 19th century imperial splendour in his 1996 adaptation, to wholesale modernisations like Michael Almereyda's 2000 contemporary reworking with Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, CEO of The Denmark Corporation (also featuring Bill Murray as Polonius!) to the most popular modern take on the material: Disney's The Lion King. Here, in Zoé Ford's adaptation, Elsinore becomes Her Majesty's Prison Liverpool. Claudius is the warden, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are snitches and Hamlet himself is an inmate, the show opening with his graphic strip-search.
Oftentimes a Shakespeare production can become unstuck when it tries to crowbar the material into a particular setting, and I had my doubts that Hamlet would even make sense within a prison. After all, Hamlet is a Prince and much of the narrative is predicated on him being able to move through the castle as he wishes. His position also allows his increasingly bizarre behaviour to be tolerated by those around him. How can this work when he's confined to a cell at the lowest rung of the social ladder?
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| When Hamlet gets really angry his hair goes a bit 1990s. |
Ford's clever solution is just to hand wave most of these problems away. The prison setting thus becomes more about tone than location; the adaptation underlining the play's pent-up masculinity, homoeroticism and authoritarian misery. This is conveyed by an impressively minimalist set. The stage at the Riverside Theatre is wide and shallow, the stage walls painted in institutional two-tone with exposed electrical transformers powering the lighting rig. Locations are delineated by three barred walls on wheels, moved around to create cells, corridors and offices. This, combined with the high contrast lighting that throws chiaroscuro shadows over the actor's faces makes for a pressure cooker environment; a place where the bloody violence of Hamlet's final scenes feels even more inevitable than usual.
And boy oh boy is this a violent Hamlet. In place of mannered, balletic rapiers duels these characters have brawny, visceral shiv fights. When Hamlet duels with Laertes it's a bare-knuckle boxing match where elbows smash teeth from gums, blood streams from swollen cuts and bones are brutally shattered. There's a protracted beating dished out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that's painfully drawn out, a symphony of thumping body blows and cries of pain. In less capable hands this might all feel a bit gratuitous - a way to make Shakespeare 'cool' for the kids - but within the prison setting it feels appropriate, the caveman barbarism contrasting neatly with the flowery language.
Another weapon in Ford's arsenal is the frequent slippage of the Shakespearian 'mask'. Characters frequently switch in tone between Shakespearian iambic pentameter and a casual, Alan Clarkish naturalism. For example, during the 'play-within-a-play', the actors bicker at each other like teenagers stuck in a GCSE English lesson ,squabbling about whether kissing each other is 'gay' or not. Similarly, the actors often slip out of the prose to make asides to each other "don't fuckin' look at me like that mate" or "I'll fuckin' av' you". This, coupled with the nasal Scouser accent, gives Shakespeare's wordy tangled prose a vaguely Brechtian artificiality (something highlighted when the fire exit is thrown open and Hamlet briefly walks out onto a humid Hammersmith street).
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| You have to fight the urge to shout out "Get 'im Hamlet!" |
Adam Lawrence's Hamlet is a sweatily intense nutter, muscles bulging from within a wifebeater and hair loosely slicked back over his head. Lawrence's approach is to play up the weird discontinuity between the depressive/suicidal soliloquys and the hyper-masculine alpha posturing. The sense that Hamlet is playing a role is a vital component of the play, Lawrence's disconnect between his actions and his internal monologue making him seem vulnerable and sympathetic even as he puts his knee through a someone's jaw. Textually Hamlet is pretending to be mad, but Lawrence's Hamlet plays up actual madness - the actor maniacally pacing about the stage with bulging eyes, compulsively slicking back his hair and, at one point, bursting randomly into a snatch of Joy Division's Transmission.
Any Shakespeare adaptation that manages to sneak in Joy Division is okay in my book, but Ford's Hamlet impresses throughout. It's not perfect mind you, Gertrude is relegated to staring in mild consternation and I was never quite sure what Ophelia was supposed to be doing in the prison, but then the focus of this Hamlet is masculinity and violence. So, while unfortunate, it's at least understandable why femininity has been sidelined here.
This could so easily have been an enormous embarrassment: a bunch of high-falutin' public school boys playing at proletariat aggression, but Ford's production emanates an oppressive sense of menace that succeeds in not only breathing life into dusty prose but actually making it feel unpredictable. Considering that Hamlet is a play everyone knows inside and out that's no small achievement - well worth checking out.
Hamlet is at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith:
Wednesday 28 May to Saturday 21 June at 7.30pm
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
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