Astronauts of Hartlepool at the Vault Festival

This review of Astronauts of Hartlepool was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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Science fiction on a shoestring? Hartlepool has you covered. Astronauts by the hundreds, the thousands, have been pulled out of orbit and towards Earth by this generally overlooked northeastern town. And in the musty, humid Pit chamber of the Vaults, you can almost smell the malaise of the forgotten backwater. Against this post-industrial backdrop, a Brexit fable plays out – but not quite the fable one might expect. Astronauts of Hartlepool is deeply ambitious and darkly funny – a twisty, turny, and revelatory look at who the ‘aliens’ in our midst truly are.

The play opens with two women, both in black jumpsuits, on opposite ends of the otherwise bare stage.

“Don’t jump!” Aidan (Sophie Steer) yells at Nadia (Rakhee Thakrar), who’s perched on what is possibly the edge of a bridge or cliff.

Nadia’s astonished. She turns. “You can see me?” she asks, slightly incredulous, a woman accustomed to being on the periphery of everyone’s vision.

Now Aidan’s a bit suspicious. “…I didn’t think you all look the same,” she tests the words in her mouth.

Oh, okay, I think, in the middle of their remarkable rapid-fire banter, this is going to be one of those direct sci-fi analogies of acceptance mapped metaphor for metaphor onto our daily lives. Nadia’s astronaut-immigrant is presumably the extra-terrestrial alien arriving on a hostile, xenophobic Earth, and Aidan interjects at this point that Hartlepool is “obviously better than where you’re from”.

Mild spoiler: it isn’t one of those sci-fi plays. Playwright Tim Foley has a glorious mass of science fiction tropes at his disposal, and he lobs each one at the audience whenever we think we’ve got the mechanics of the play figured out.

There’s a taste of the stable time loop of Groundhog Day or All You Need Is Kill in the opening scenes, as Aidan encounters ‘Nadia’ again and again. But once the rules of these occurrences are established, Foley pulls the rug out from under us and introduces his sprawling, ever-unfurling multiverse, a series of stacked alternate dimensions from which an endless stream of Nadias arrives week after week. (Did I spy a hint of that Doctor Who–River Song anachronic order of meetings?) Rakhee Thakrar is spot-on in her varied portrayals of the various Nadias, each slightly different from the next, her body language and tiny tics fleshing out each complete character. She and Sophie Steer have wonderful chemistry, their energy unflagging as they – under Siobhan Cannon-Brownlie’s excellent direction – single-handedly conjure up the lush, complex world they find themselves in with hardly any props and the minimal use of lighting and some well-timed blackouts.

So much is packed into a production of just over an hour, as we discover each character’s back story, their disenfranchisement, and the compromises and choices they’ve been compelled to make in order to leave terrible circumstances behind or to attempt to change a dying, rotting world. There are several other mind-bending twists to the plot, which allow the audience to put together the puzzle bit by bit, scene by scene, until the moments arrive, in quick succession, where the pieces click together ever so satisfyingly. The audience is worked hard to get the larger picture at play, but it’s deeply rewarding when that image comes into focus.

It’s hard to avoid the baggage of political didacticism that comes with this theatrical analysis of current affairs and the immigration crisis, but the creative team does this as deftly as they can, choosing subliminal messaging and bleak humour over slogans and feel-good advocacy. Astronauts of Hartlepool suggests that we are all aliens, that we are all astronauts – but also that the situation at hand doesn’t have easy answers and that every stubborn conviction comes with thick layers of accumulated bitterness or grief. The sins of the fathers and mothers are visited on their sons and daughters, over and over again. One terrible, misunderstood encounter can lead to decades of violence and exclusion.

Astronauts of Hartlepool is as sharply funny as it is deafeningly sad, a well-timed commentary about the times we live in – where a revolution can hinge on a tiny change, or where change can be failed by a revolution.

Produced by Hannah Tookey
Directed by Siobhán Cannon-Brownlie
Written by Tim Foley
Cast includes Sophie Steer and Rakhee Thakrar

NOW17 Week 1: PLANES and This Moment Now at The Yard Theatre

This review of the opening week of the NOW17 festival was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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The opening double-bill of the ongoing NOW17 festival at The Yard Theatre takes two very different approaches to the question of mortality. In Richard Dodwell’s PLANES, it’s the absence that death brings in the suicide of his sister; in Sylvia Rimat’s This Moment Now, it’s the presence that conception bestows on the unborn child in her womb. Both halves of the evening pose questions that will never be answered: How long do we each have to live? Does my child get a smaller number of years than I do, or will he or she outlive me? Why did my sister choose to die? Where do we go from here?

Dodwell describes PLANES as ‘a live tuning’, and it does feel like an extended tone poem, relying on the evocations of sound and video imagery over his own performance delivery and narrative. He pierces the fog-filled room with the beam of a high-powered flashlight when he enters it, and as the piece unfolds we realise he is still feeling around in the dark for answers. His quiet eulogy to his sister and confessional episodes about his own life and sexuality are punctuated by fragments of video and the plaintive, dissonant notes of the live piano and violin, accompanied by the fizz of static on the walkie-talkie he cradles throughout the piece. Knitting these plot lines together is the metaphor of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the plane that vanished in 2014 while enroute to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur and has never been found. Just as investigators have tried and failed to piece together the scattered evidence of the plane’s disappearance, Dodwell has no answers for his sister’s death even as he rummages through memories of his childhood and her struggles with borderline personality disorder.

It’s often difficult to gauge how much ‘authentic’ emotion to display to an audience about a deeply personal, scarring event – what might be interpreted as ‘too much’, and therefore ‘histrionic’ and ‘over-performed’; or what might be misconstrued as ‘too little’, and therefore ‘unfeeling’ or ‘impersonal’. There are no rules for grief, and Dodwell chooses to talk about her sister and their relationship in a soft, self-conscious monotone, removing emotion from the equation altogether. This means that there is a stasis that eventually settles over the piece, the sort of suspended animation one might feel mid-journey on a long flight when, gazing out the window, it isn’t certain at first glance whether one is moving or standing still. This purgatorial sensation means it is sometimes difficult to focus on Dodwell’s long streams of prose, even if his sentences are often very beautiful. “4am over the Atlantic is prime time for tears,” he says, quietly, “The lights dimmed in sleep – or perhaps death.” It can be very powerful to deal with trauma in an understated way, but this also means that the audience has less of a grasp on what propels the work forward.

The rhythmic leap from PLANES to This Moment Now is a large one; This Moment Now opens with the clack of four metronomes both in sync and out of sync, and drummer Chris Langton plunging into an energetic solo, setting the mood for Rimat’s quirky meditation on life. His complex rhythmic interludes continue to form the backbone of the work. There’s a different brand of self-consciousness at work here, with Rimat mining her physical awkwardness – she’s 4½ months pregnant – for charming visual humour. The metaphors for her production are more abstract ones, drawing from a simplified version of the second law of thermodynamics (largely dealing with entropy), as well as Einstein’s theory of relativity, and applying it to how we experience time. Some of these ‘manipulations’ of time are baldly gimmicky (e.g. stage manager Alasdair Jones asking us to set our watches to an atomic clock, or Rimat telling us she will slow down the performance time so that time passes slower in the room), but Rimat is an endearing performer, and even if her time-related excavations only just brush the surface, they are filled with joy and delight. Some of the most engaging, thoughtful questions posed by the piece come from her video interviews with an eight-year-old girl and a 92-year-old woman, and their markedly different perceptions of time, as well as their demonstrations of what a little bit of time (a girl at the beginning of her life) and a lot of time (a grandmother close to the end of hers) do to the human body.

But beneath all the trimmings is a moving question about the new journey she is embarking on, one as a mother-to-be. Can it even be called a ‘journey’, if the human perception of a ‘moment’ is just three seconds? Rimat positions herself between the dancing images of 8-year-old Rose and 92-year-old Eileen, and as she begins to dance with abandon, we begin to wonder: Is her body still growing – or beginning to break down? She asks us to ponder how much time we have left, and as the hour-long show draws to a close, I realise I have given an hour of my life to her; but she’s also given an hour to me, in exchange.

The lack of a finite, known journey through life frames both PLANES and This Moment Now, but both are less concerned with journeys and more preoccupied with turning points, pivots, moments and decisions. Perhaps ‘journey’ is the wrong metaphor for life, they suggest. In inviting us to participate, to listen, and even to drink tea, they seem to say: perhaps we ought to simply be.

PLANES
Written and performed by Richard Dodwell
Directed by Nick Blackburn
Live score by Timothy Thornton
Violin Toby Hawks

This Moment Now
Concept and performance by Sylvia Rimat
Stage manager Alasdair Jones
Video and sound design by Sam Halmarack
Choreography by Laura Dannequin
Drummer Chris Langton

In the Depths of Dead Love at the Print Room

I recently reviewed a controversial production of Howard Barker's In the Depths of Dead Love at the Print Room at the Coronet, which faced fierce accusations of 'yellowface' casting and a protest on the opening night of the play. This review was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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As someone who translates literary work from Chinese to English, my currency is precision of language. Can I communicate what the author wants to say – not only in intent, but in tone? There are several schools of thought here: one could retain that “exotic flavour” of Chineseness in the text by valuing the literal over the literary; or one could translate the work such that it feels, in English, as close to the way it is felt in Chinese.

When I was much younger, I would read abridged versions of Chinese classics such as The Water Margin or Dream of the Red Chamber (which is sometimes translated as A Dream of Red Mansions or A Dream of Red Pavilions). Many of these adaptations for young audiences came in both English and Chinese, and to my bilingual ears, the English translations would invariably sound verbose and clumsy – the original Chinese, sharp and succinct. I would come to realise, much later on, that many readers who only understood English largely assumed that Chinese was a florid language because of these literal translations, when in fact it was the prolixity of English that made it so. Chinese idioms, for instance, can be incredibly evocative in four choice words, when it might take several sentences to explain them in English.

In In the Depths of Dead Love, playwright Howard Barker’s characters speak exactly like these over-literal, wilfully exotic translations. The suicidal Lady Hasi (Stella Gonet) visits the poet Chin’s “bottomless” well every day, hoping she might have the courage to take the leap and die. She describes her falling silk handkerchief and how it might land on her face “quite possibly like a fine scattering of snow”. Chin (James Clyde), who’s been commanded by Hasi’s husband Lord Ghang (William Chubb) to give her the push she needs, craves the sensuality of Hasi’s shoulders, shoulders “as frail as two twigs” that might have been braided together “by a solitary child in the forest”. The forced poetry in every line often feels like a ridiculous parody of how a non-Chinese speaker might imagine a Chinese speaker would sound like if Chinese were English. And even if the all-white cast had been entirely Asian, the sting of this artifice would remain.

By setting a play in ancient China, Barker may argue that he’s employing a “distancing effect” by having “rarely ever set a play in my own culture”. The converse is also true, that by deliberately setting a piece in a specific place the audience is invited to bring to the production their cultural preconceptions and misconceptions of this location. The setting, Barker insists, is “entirely artificial” and “entirely European in its sensibilities” – in which case it seems puzzling to be so specific about the location at all. In fact, there’s a blatant disregard of any understanding of the Chinese language, where Barker toys with the words “push” and “shove” in English as a plot device and attempts to evoke some humour in the wordplay; in Chinese, the root word for both is the same (推; tui), which strips the puns of any meaning. While the Print Room at the Coronet wrestled with accusations of yellowface in its casting of this play, I’d argue that the problems here go beyond the choice of actors. It’s the deliberate decision to frame the play with a certain culture in mind, then to rely on the audience’s stereotypes about this culture’s people and history in order to propel the plot forward, and then to insist that this culture is merely a metaphor because “the theatre isn’t a place for literalness”.

What makes a metaphor an effective one? Metaphor is often at the heart of the fable and the parable, the simple, sometimes whimsical or mythical stories that hold universal truths and draw unexpected parallels with our present realities. I’m reminded of the fable of the frog in the well, one of the first idioms that children learn (the idiom, in all its beautiful brevity, is 井底之蛙; jing di zhi wa, which expands to “the frog at the bottom of the well”). Popularised by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (around the 4th century B.C.), the story goes that a frog living at the bottom of a well believes that the circle of sky above it is the entire world – until a sea turtle arrives and destroys this complacency, regaling the frog with stories of the ocean and what lies beyond. The frog is left speechless. Jing di zhi wa is now often used to describe someone who is ignorant or narrow-minded about the world.

Director Gerrard McArthur calls In the Depths of Dead Love a fable, but it’s really a faux fable with metaphor so thickly slathered, so artificial, so self-indulgent and aggressive in its search for the profound, with characters so thin I feared they would break. For a play that wrestles with mortality and confronting death, there are little to no stakes in the potential deaths of any of its characters. There’s a deliberate decision, a la Brecht, to expose the “bottomless” well in the centre of the stage as a shallow one of about two feet deep – but the production can’t seem to decide if this is a playful mockery of the suicidal act, or a serious visual aid used in several deeply emotional moments. The quartet of actors bluster and pontificate on the stage, doing their best to bring some energy to their conversations, but they can’t help that the protracted, trudging plot is mind-numbingly dull.

Barker has wrapped himself so securely in his theory of “theatre of catastrophe” that any criticism of him might feel futile, as his deliberate intention is to baffle and disorient the audience and to revel in an audience divided, whose expectations are constantly undermined. I wish I had felt baffled and disoriented, I wish my expectations had been undermined; instead I was bored. My companion fell asleep for 10 minutes and woke to find she had missed barely anything at all. She had closed her eyes to get a sense of what the play might have been like in its first incarnation as a radio play, and concluded that the physical staging of the piece hadn’t added very much to it at all.

I believe that theatre can and should transgress, should rupture boundaries and provoke its audiences to reassess themselves. But I think these profanations are also the most effective and revelatory when their creator has a deep understanding of the culture he is choosing to subvert. When these confrontations feel completely arbitrary, or rely on tired stereotypes, then the power of the provocation quickly fades away.

After watching this play, I felt very much like the turtle gazing down with pity at the frog at the bottom of its narrow, dried-up well.

The Collector at Greenwich Theatre

An edited version of this review was first published on Everything Theatre. The Collector, which won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, was an arresting look at torture in the US-run prisons of war-torn Iraq in 2003-2004 from three different vantage points.

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The Collector opens with an encounter with a ghost. Kasprowicz (William Reay), a captain in the US military, is visibly shaken, and there’s a quiver in his comfortable Southern drawl. It’s not the presence of the ghost in the Iraqi military prison that unnerves him, it’s the absence that it stands for – the facelessness, the shadows in the dark. 

This spectral metaphor carries through the play, with three characters taking turns to tell the story of Nassir, a charming Iraqi interpreter who loves American music and has high hopes for a future Iraqi democracy after what he thinks will be a brief war. We know he’s wrong, of course, but his optimism is infectious – despite the fact that Nassir doesn’t have a physical presence on stage. He’s the ghost in the room, the present absence. Through the stories of his fiancee, Zoya (Anna Riding), his American colleague, Sergeant Foster (Olivia Beardsley), and his superior, Captain Kasprowicz, we get both the story of an individual with conflicted loyalties – as well as a war gone horribly wrong. Nassir may be the crucial interpreter for the American army, the pivot on which interrogations and negotiations rest, but because he isn’t present on stage, his actions and decisions must, in a sense, be interpreted by the rest. It’s a clever device, allowing us several varying but complementary points of view as the three performers piece together and translate his every move.

Dissecting the US war in Iraq is an ambitious undertaking, and playwright Henry Naylor chooses to focus on the intimate interactions between this tightly knit group of characters. We get equal insight into Nassir’s domestic life and his working life, how he must navigate his initially unquestioning loyalty to the Americans for a freedom hoped for, but also confront the eventual realisation that the American war machine and its facade of heroism is really not what it seems. Nassir is a cultural intermediary: a “compatriot” to his newfound American community but a blacklisted “collaborator” to the Iraqi insurgents; and the titular “collector” – of music, hopes and dreams – to his wife-to-be. Naylor juggles these three identities with a great deal of skill character-wise, but plot-wise he’s forced to turn to a few obvious devices to propel the story along, including a romantic tryst that feels forced and doesn’t give the emotional payoff that’s needed later on.

Actors Riding, Reay and Beardsley are a well-oiled ensemble and play off each other’s energy comfortably. Their characters speak as they would in a documentary piece, directly to the audience, and this act of confiding their hopes and fears gives the play a strong sense of intimacy. The spare set design, three incandescent light bulbs suspended over three stools, mirrors the austerity of a prison cell – or perhaps the figurative prison cell that Nassir finds himself in as his three identities become increasingly at odds with one another. In the cavernous Greenwich Theatre, however, the wider distance between the audience and the storytellers sacrifices some of the action's immediacy and edge as the actors struggle to evoke the confines of either a jail cell – or the initial refuge of a civilian home that quickly begins to feel like a prison.

As the 75-minute play speeds to a close, Naylor’s carefully crafted critique of America’s wartime atrocities changes tracks abruptly, losing its sting when it becomes a generic critique of the darkness of the human heart, and the depths to which it will descend in order to survive. There is truth in this Conradian “heart of darkness”, but I wonder if The Collector might have been more powerful still had Naylor pursued that thread right to the end. But the production remains a rare theatrical examination of torture during the war in Iraq that benefits from a documentarian’s eye and historical hindsight. This may be a play investigating torture, but it’s one that wisely chooses not to depict or glorify a single act of graphic torture on stage. The Collector is a haunting reminder of a recent past that many have been all too quick to forget.

Playwright: Henry Naylor
Director: Michael Cabot
Presented by: Kathryn Barker in association with London Classic Theatre
Box Office: 020 8858 7755
Booking Link: http://ticketing.greenwichtheatre.org.uk/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=60689
Booking Until: 21 January 2017

Abigail at The Bunker

Pardon the long break. Here's my review of Abigail at The Bunker, first published on Everything Theatre.

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Who is Abigail, really? Her name is never spoken throughout this hour-long play, but it hangs in the air like a gift and a curse. Abigail pieces together the relationship between a 20-something young Woman (Tia Bannon) and a 40-something older Man (Mark Rose), both unnamed. There’s an echo of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) here, the similarly mononymous novel where a naive younger woman is quickly enchanted by an older man when they meet on holiday. But this is where the contemporary homage ends. This time, it’s the Man who’s enchanted by a nubile young thing, but whose romantic ideals will soon be dashed. And the ghost that haunts this play’s relationship isn’t a female paragon of perfection, but an Oedipal shadow from the Woman’s past.

Abigail feels like the darker, angstier foil to Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years, where a sense of optimism tends to linger even if we know the relationship doesn’t. As the timelines of the two lovers in the musical converge and then unspool, there’s still a latent cheerfulness as one half of the duo gazes, rosy-eyed, at all the love waiting for her in the future. There’s no such hopefulness in Abigail, where, to quote one of the characters, it’s ‘one or two months of nice stuff followed by ten months of shit’.

Playwright Fiona Doyle presents a fractured series of vignettes from different moments in the couple’s time together, leaping back and forth from the wake of a bitter argument, to a chance first encounter at an airport, to a vacation taken together abroad. There are some frank, refreshing discussions about relationships and some amusingly authentic moments of awkwardness, but these tend to get washed out as Woman evolves rapidly from the Pixie to the Manic of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and this transformation wipes out any sharp observations that might have been drawn about a couple struggling to make a relationship work (or deliberately sabotaging it). The temporality of this relationship is also evoked through the set, a veritable mountain of makeshift cardboard boxes, with symbols for fragile objects printed on the sides, and a suitcase in a corner. Throughout the course of the play, the set is increasingly littered with clothing, a beer bottle or two, and the detritus of emotional baggage strewn across the stage.

We aren’t sure who Abigail is, but Abigail doesn’t seem too sure about what it is, either. If it’s meant to be a close study of a relationship falling apart at the seams, the shifting timeline of the storytelling means that there are a lot of large gaps – some of which work in giving the play a sense of intrigue and unpredictability; others mean that we are left with a lot of gaping holes as to the characters’ motivations and intentions. Bannon and Rose do their best with what they’re given, with Rose turning in a sturdy, believable performance as a man first entranced, then quickly disillusioned as what once was a spark of magic turns into the ashes of frustration and denial. Or is Abigail meant to be a study of one woman’s dark streak that poisons a promising relationship? There are strange, unresolved hints of a larger mystery at play here that may very well be red herrings, thrown out as quickly as the play ends. The couple’s age gap is hinted at, but never interrogated, in what I felt was a lost opportunity.

The weather cooperated marvellously the night I watched this play in The Bunker’s subterranean space – a night where miserable sleet pelted London and dark, glittering ice covered the streets. In one scene, the couple sits at a lookout point on a mountain and are disappointed by the thick fog covering what was supposed to be a sumptuous, ‘bucket-list’ view. They then pick up a spray of buttercups, where the Man points out that the beautiful buds are poisonous. In Abigail, like Rebecca, one thing is for certain: what is beautiful might just kill you – or, worse still, disappoint you.

Playwright: Fiona Doyle
Director: Joshua McTaggart
Producers: Zoe Robinson and Joel Fisher
Designer: Max Dorey
Sound Designer: Andy Josephs
Lighting Designer: Christopher Nairne
Box Office: 0207 234 0486
Booking Link: https://www.bunkertheatre.com/whats-on/abigail
Booking Until: 4 February 2017