Improbable,
English National Opera and Metropolitan Opera
Satyagraha
London
Coliseum
7
April 2007
Reviewed
by Matthew Isaac Cohen
Satyagraha, a collaboration
on the opera by Philip Glass by the English National Opera and
Metropolitan Opera of New York with Improbable, follows the acclaim
given to the ENO/Met collaboration with London-based puppet company
Blind Summit on Madame Butterfly. Satyagraha is fully animated
by a dedicated 'skills ensemble' cast of twelve puppeteers, aerialists,
stilt walkers, prop makers and dramatic extras. Improbable's creative
team under the direction of Phelim McDermott (director) and Julian
Crouch (associate director and set designer) have produced a work
of musical theatre that is deeply meditative in tone, emphasising
rough puppetry and process over product.
Satyagraha (1980) is the second
of Phillip Glass's three 'portrait operas', sandwiched between
Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten. The piece centres around M.K.
Gandhi's years in South Africa around the turn of the twentieth
century, when Gandhi published a newspaper titled Indian Opinion
and led a movement of non-violent resistance, which he dubbed
satyagraha (truth-force), directed against colonial legislation
discriminating against South Asians. The opera's text is
based on the Bhagavad Gita and sung entirely in Sanskrit. Musically,
the opera is the epitome of minimalism, characterised by gradually
modulated repeated phrases (modelled on Indian ragas).
Improbable's production disdains
the polished images and grand spectacle popularly associated with
opera, working instead with self-consciously poor materials. The
action is contained within a set of curved corrugated iron, inspired
by colonial architecture and intended to evoke a symbolic space
of struggle. Windows and portals open from time to time for entrances,
exits and tableaux. Puppets are fashioned onstage from crumpled
newspapers and papier-mâché and baskets.
The dissonance between the
smooth minimalism and the rough puppetry is effective, opening
up many avenues for contemplation about relations between cause
and effect. Not all the scenic imagery is as powerful as it might
be. For example, I found the construction of a gigantic spirit
figure of Sellotape in Act III to be long in the making and lacking
expression in its completed state. In a post-performance discussion
(itself a first for the ENO), McDermott and Crouch suggested that
this might be part of the point: satyagraha involves staying the
course and being persistent despite resistance offered. The struggle
of satyagraha was thus reflected in the struggle of the theatre-makers,
the failures in execution as important as the polished perfection
in timing and choreography. This perhaps is one of the great moral
lessons offered by puppetry: man is not always the measure of
things.
Ronnie
Burkett Theatre of Marionettes
Ten
Days on Earth
Barbican
Pit/BITE
London
19
April 2007
Reviewed
by Dorothy Max Prior
Watching Ten Days on Earth
I had one of those moments when you step outside of yourself for
an instant. At that moment I thought "I'm sitting here in
a darkened theatre, at a serious international arts event, watching
a marionette show - and onstage a goofy puppet dog, a chirpy chick
and a cute toy lamb-girl are talking and singing little songs."
But the moment quickly passed, and I was once again drawn into
the tale unfolding, willing to suspend all disbelief.
The cuddly toys (Honeydog,
Little Burp, and Blanche du Baaa) provide the story within the
story, bedtime book characters that illustrate the 'child with
adult desires' internal life of Darrel Glebeholme, a middle aged
man with learning difficulties who finds himself home alone, rattling
around an empty house in which his mother has passed away - except
that he doesn't really understand that she is dead, tentatively
greeting and taking leave of her each day as he goes off to work
and comes home again; mildly complaining about the lack of dinner,
and worrying whether his Mom is cross at him because she isn't
speaking.
It is a heartrending story,
the lonely dreams inside the house juxtaposed with ghostly re-enactments
of scenes from his mother Ivy's life, and with beautifully realised
encounters with the outside world, which is populated by a series
of colourful characters including Lloyd the lyrical tramp, a sparky
Sally Army lady called Irene and Darrel's 'girlfriend' Big Patsy.
There is so much going on -
so many well developed characters, each on their own trajectory
in real or dream time; so many cleverly interweaving narrative
strands; so many poignant thoughts and challenging ideas and overwhelming
emotions swirling around - that it is only at the end of the two-hour
no-interval marathon, as Burkett takes his bows, that you really
take in that this - all of this! - is just one man on a stage.
If you've seen Burkett perform
you'll know that in that two hours he doesn't let up for a moment;
he's a bundle of energy constantly manipulating his team of marionettes
whilst simultaneously voicing all the characters - and even though
for this show he has chosen to stay in a traditional marionetting
mode, working in semi-darkness above his long-stringed puppets,
he is so much the total performer that our eyes are constantly
drawn to him. To some, this stealing of attention from the puppets
would be considered bad form. But somehow it feels just right:
the puppeteer as shaman living out the emotions for and with his
puppets.
And if you've seen a Burkett
show before you'll also know that everything on stage is beautifully
crafted to a point of obsessive perfection: the set and the puppets
carved and hewn and chiselled and painted with loving care and
an attention to detail that goes beyond any sort of rational need.
It is noted in the programme that the puppets' handmade brogues
have exactly the right number of holes punched into their leather
uppers.
If you haven't seen Burkett,
then you must. Not just because of the importance he has to puppetry,
but because he is a supreme theatre-maker. In the end, it isn't
about the puppets, marvellous though they are. It's about one
man telling stories, using anything he has to hand. Is that a
heretical thought?
Reviews
from Brighton Festival and Fringe
Stephen
Clark (writer)/Nitin Sawhney (composer)
Mahabharata
Theatre
Royal/Brighton Festival
25
May 2007
Reviewed
by Beccy Smith
Mahabharata has a fine vintage
- I'm a fan of Nitin Sawhney's music and the promised combination
of Kathak choreography (by Gauri Sharma Tripathi) with puppetry
(by Sue Buckmaster), both forms with strong traditions in Indian
storytelling, sounded rich in possibility. Unfortunately this
is not the only fruit of an auspicious and heavily invested collaboration
I've witnessed of late whose lineage exudes promise the production
proves woefully unable to fulfil.
As many reviewers have noted,
reducing the epic 76,000 verses of the Mahabharata ('India's greatest
epic') into a mere 2hours and 40minutes of dramatic representation
is an epic task all on its own. Add to this the episodic
quality of the material, its mythic treatment of characters, and
ideas in a tradition whose points of reference can feel obscure
and far removed, and creating a dramatically dynamic piece of
storytelling (within the confines of music theatre) becomes a
real challenge. It seems to be one that the company has approached
diversely - the score articulating one mode and set of themes,
the set (a clunky asymmetrical tower clearly intended to be symbolic
of Something but succeeding only in proving laughably predictable
as a piece of stage kit) trying to establish another. The writing
and lyrics seemed to be attempting to imbue characters intended
as mythic and narrative archetypes with the sort of conflicted
modern western interiority normally better suited to soap. And
the villain was straight out of panto, complete with a suspicious
looking moustache.
The production vaunts its 'total
theatre' qualifications with pride, but every element felt tokenistic.
In a whistle-stop tour we visit abstract dance, and more figuratively
expressive choreography, elements of circus (both silks and stilts),
film and stills projections, and puppetry. The tabletop puppetry
sequence, where women puppets wash their clothes in a river whilst
one woman bundles her child into a basket and mourns his loss,
was decently choreographed, with simple colour and chorus movements,
but the weight of expressiveness was carried by the music. I wanted
to float away with it. Sadly not even Nitin Sawhney and a full
size orchestra could save this overblown and over-egged production
from itself.
Ian
Saville
Brecht
on Magic 2007: Magic for Socialism
Komedia
Studio, Brighton Fringe Festival
12
May 2007
Reviewed
by Matthew Isaac Cohen
Ian Saville's Brecht on Magic
2007 is a rare revival of a 1985 solo show with a uniquely clever
premise. The gods from Bertolt Brecht's play The Good Person of
Szechuan (represented by a blow-up plastic cloud and rainbow and
a recorded voice) descend to earth to find out whether it is possible
to have socialist culture within capitalist society. Due to a
miscalculation of exchange rates, they are unable to afford a
ticket to the National or RSC, and instead engage the magician
Ian Saville to perform socialist magic for them. As a reward,
the gods leave behind a dummy of Bertolt Brecht, who tutors Saville
in art and politics.
The play is intensely meta-theatrical
with frequent recourse to, and commentary upon, Brechtian verfremdungseffekts. Saville makes the most out of temporal disjunctions,
commenting knowingly on the differences between political and
theatrical culture in 1985 and today. The play is also intensely
political, using a classic rope trick to illustrate Marx and Engels'
theory of class struggle from The Communist Manifesto, for example.
But all the discourse on alienation of labour, national politics
and social transformation is done with good humour, in between
magic tricks and amusing asides.
The magic itself is well performed,
though my wife and daughter, sitting in the front row of the intimate
Komedia Studio, said they could see the strings in Saville's card
tricks. Saville's lips moved noticeably when he voiced Bertolt
Brecht, and the manipulation of the doll was perfunctory at times.
Not that this mattered much: Saville's moving lips were often
the brunt of his own jokes. Saville's point is not to perform
what he calls 'bourgeois magic', but to use popular entertainment
to change the way we think and behave. Brecht on Magic 2007 provides
an opportunity for reflection upon the fate of radical theatre,
and how much idealism British performance has lost over the last
two decades. It is a necessary intervention, and should be seen
by anyone who cares about theatre and society.
NACL
The
Confessions of Punch and Judy
The
Nightingale Theatre/ Brighton Festival Fringe
20
May 2007
Reviewed
by Darren East
"Are we monsters?" this very
human Punch and Judy ask each other. Despite NACL's exuberant
theatricality, the pair's arguments repeatedly begin with wincingly
recognisable moments of trivial tactlessness that escalate inexorably.
This is, entirely and precisely, a show about being a couple,
about the terrors and wishes of intimacy, about the power struggles
and the needless yet somehow necessary arguments that life together
provokes.
NACL (North American Cultural
Laboratory) is a New York-based experimental theatre company who
work with a laboratory-based process of 'practical research'.
Actor training is core to their work, and it is a joy to watch
their rigorously controlled but explosive physicality - in an
instant they jump-cut between banal domesticity and stylised combat,
ballroom dancing, or a vicious human ventriloquism act.
There is great puppetry, too,
especially when the characters 'express' their individual turmoil
and vulnerability: Punch tells a bastardised creation myth - And
God Created Punch - with his hammers and tools; Judy a Snake Prince
folk tale with a stocking and shoes. In both cases, the animation
used exquisite stillness, until the crucial moments of action:
the violent dink of a hammer, the shedding of a stocking.
But why Punch and Judy? On
one level, the connection provides a frame for a show that contains
such varied performance elements: the (literally framing) coloured
drapes, the stories, the songs, the profusion of action. But it
doesn't quite work, entirely: the familiar Punch story is only
incidentally about a couple - Judy rarely survives the first act,
after all. Punch is a celebration of individual anarchic rebellion,
and there was nothing here as cathartically, unreasonably savage
as a good Punch and Judy show - something perhaps only puppets
can deliver. I wondered if it was this mismatch of forms that
ultimately undermined the redemptive narrative here and, particularly,
the ending of the piece when the couple find connection and consolation
in a most uncharacteristically flabby bit of play with a large
gold sheet.
But I will remember the many
theatrically masterful elements; the show was, pleasingly, most
compassionate towards its central characters when it showed them
at their monstrous worst.
Swazzled
Theatre
That's
the Way To Do It!
Brighton
Media Centre/ Brighton Festival Fringe
11
May 2007
Reviewed
by Beccy Smith
It
seems a strange coincidence to have two shows that
have catapulted Punch and Judy from the puppet booth to the main
stage in this year's Brighton Fringe. What is the lure of converting
this classic form? Both shows make use of puppetry, although
not as the main vehicle for expression; a greater degree of psychologising
is aspired to, whilst keeping hold of those elements of shape,
colour, even content which characterise the original. In
both cases the shows seem to be both re-presentation and comment
- but what is the comment they're trying to make and why is it
relevant now?
The main problem with That's
the Way to Do it! is its apparent ambition to make an (a)moral
point through this choice of form. Opening with archive footage
of young children squealing with glee at classic scenes of Punch
and Judy knockabout, the premise of the show's title is a sort
of naughty, self-knowing snigger about what any criticism of Punch
reveals about our secret enjoyment of such qualities. Punch here
becomes a loveable rogue, who in a strangely psychologised moment
with the Devil is truly penitent (a depth of character that's
an unfortunate side effect of using human actors, masked or not),
and who then uses our sympathy to drive home his final point.
Unfortunately, to try to forge such transparent parallels between
Punch and his audience represents a fundamental misunderstanding.
The world created by Punch and Judy never can be directly reflective
of our own - its evocation through puppets has evolved for a reason
- their liberty to unleash and harness deep impulses and hold
them within their own form.
There were, however, many strong
elements to this show. Recasting Punch and Judy with human performers
on a cartoonish kitchen sink council-estate set, the company showcased
a strong visual and physical style. Working entirely in half mask,
knockabout sequences were choreographed and executed with panache.
The company played inventively with their material, playing close
to their sources, and transplanting traditional sequences - Judy's
murder; the fight with the crocodile (here re-imagined as a huge-jawed
shaggy dog) outwitting and killing the policemen (a terrifically
sexual re-imagination of the sausages) onto their grotesque human
canvas. Glove puppet representation was used for the most luridly
violent episodes (which begged the question of why actors were
used in the first place). The writing was strong - a hurdy-gurdy
rhythm of rhyming couplets heightening the skewed reality of the
stage world and occasionally offering up a really satisfying pay
off.
This premiere production from
Swazzled displays a vivid theatrical imagination and promising
individual style. Yet in its triumphant brandishing of an incessant
physical and verbal violence as innate to the form - the
company vigorously raise the stakes, including anal penetration,
murderous masturbation and ripping a dog completely inside out
- without adequate dramatic justification, it left this reviewer
feeling a littleÉ swazzled.
Streets
of Brighton 2007
Various
artists
11-12 May 2007
Friday 11 May Festival Roundup
by Matthew Isaac Cohen
The Brighton Festival is often
likened to the Edinburgh Festivals, and there are indeed many
resemblances in programming, celebratory mood and temperamental
weather. The Streets of Brighton is distinguished from Edinburgh's
street art. While Edinburgh sports a hodgepodge of street entertainers
of the sort performing year-round in Covent Garden and London's
tube stations, Streets of Brighton is a well-curated festival
of street performance, with a diversity of acts from all over
the UK and Europe performing in a compact area of the city on
two consecutive afternoons. A free 20-page illustrated guide with
a helpful map and schedule allows you to maximise your fun.
I spent a jolly afternoon in
the company of my wife and daughter sitting in the Pavilion Gardens
watching street theatre, jostling for a glimpse of stunt bike
riding on New Road, listening to the strains of pop music bands
and soaking up the atmosphere of this seaside town, with an occasional
glimmer of sunshine.
The highpoint for me was Paka
the Uncredible, a double act with a morose old man in aviator's
glasses and a mechanical horse. This had poetry, invention, audience
involvement and a pyrotechnic ending with old man Paka igniting
the horse's nostrils, and mounting his steed with a blow torch
in hand.
It was hard also to resist
the charms of Deep Sea Divers, a strolling surf band dressed in
wet suits and flippers playing back-to-the-60s pop music.
Somewhat less satisfying were
a pair of dancing giant prawns in body costumes that peeled off
their outer shells and then peeled real prawns and cast them to
the ground to striptease music.
One of the larger acts of the
festival was Caravan of Desire, a 40-minute physical theatre show
featuring two holidaymakers and a mechanically controlled caravan
that elevated, tilted and sprouted vegetal appendages. The performance
I saw was marred by delays and technical problems. In one unintentionally
funny scene, the holidaymakers retired to the caravan for a bit
of saucy fun. After a long interlude, with technicians running
this way and that, the side of the caravan opened up to reveal
the holidaymakers in erotic costumes along with a technician tinkering
with an internal mechanism.
A real crowd-pleaser though
was the Ramshacklicious, a music-filled street theatre show about
old grandmother Nan who is carted around in a coffin by her three
gypsy grandsons. She refuses to die until she sees at least one
of them married - to a member of the audience. The foursome play
musical instruments, sing, dance and do acrobatics and clowning.
Nan's late husband makes a brief appearance as an animated face
made up of food, with biscuits for eyelids and oranges for eyes.
Reminiscing about their wedding night, the husband's banana-nose
explodes, spilling goopy banana all over Nan's hair and dress.
We did not get to see all of
the 18 shows in the festival. Among the shows we missed was the
only ticketed act, an installation by French company KompleX KapharnauM,
and a walkabout act called Microscopic Animal Enthusiasts. My
daughter was particularly keen to see the latter, but we were
unable to find it on the streets. Overall, however, we felt quite
satisfied after 3 or 4 hours of street shows: it was a good day
out at a family-friendly event, and we look forward to returning
to Brighton again.
Reviews
from X.trax Showcase in Manchester
Pickled Image
Bernard's
Puppet Bonanza/The Marvellous Box Of Peeps and Delights
Nakupelle
Monkey
Business
X.trax Showcase/FEAST
Platt Fields Park
Manchester
2 June 07
Reviewed by Dorothy
Max Prior
X.trax is an annual showcase
of outdoor performance, geared towards the street arts industry
but presented alongside Feast! Festival (this in its turn is presented
by Manchester International Arts). So although it is for the most
part the same work being seen, there is a difference in intention:
whilst families picnic by the lakeside, leisurely taking in any
strolling street acts that come their way, perhaps occasionally
joining the audience around a static street show, delegates race
around trying to catch all the shows circled on their programmes
in between endless networking sessions, drinks receptions, meetings
with old friends, or occasionally just sitting in the sunshine
to catch breath. Oh life is hard sometimes.
Of course, puppetry has always
played an important role in street arts (see, for example, articles
in our new Animated
Encounters publication!) and x.trax therefore included a number
of puppetry shows, as well as physical theatre pieces which incorporated
object animation to some degree (the Ramshakalicious show being
an example; this reviewed by Animations at Streets of Brighton
in this edition but was also seen in Manchester).
I will now confess that I failed
to catch everything I wanted to, despite the festival's careful
programming and timetabling - perhaps that is the inevitable experience
of attending street arts festivals. Things run concurrently, things
run a little late, or something happening at the falafel stall
or by the swing boats becomes a sort of spontaneous theatre piece
and you find yourself loitering rather than hurrying to your next
destination. I was determined to see Nakupelle, but managed only
to see the final third of Monkey Business. So I feel unqualified
to comment very much on the show, other than to say that from
what I did see, the puppet monkey was indeed very funky, manipulated
with care and precision and full of energy; that I liked the use
of the Commedia style half masks; that the visual aesthetic was
lovely, the performance booth a kind of purple jack-in-the-box
construction; and that the show had an old-fashioned (in the good
sense of that word) ethos of pleasing a crowd with gently teasing
words, visual humour, and music.
I fared better with Pickled
Image, managing to see both their presentations. They are a two-person
company, comprising Dik Downey and Vicky Andrews - he usually
to be found upfront, she is the behind-the-scenes manipulator.
One of their pieces was a static show in a wonderfully distressed
traditional booth (more on that in a moment) and the other was
a kind of walkabout piece - more precisely, The Marvellous Box
Of Peeps and Delights is a 'What the Butler Saw' on wheels that
is parked up on a busy corner, passers-by urged to sample its
wares. In an admirable evocation of the days of the travelling
showman, a spivvy Dik Downey urges us to Roll Up! Roll Up! and
take turns peeping into the box. "Come along lads, here's your
chance to see a real woman!" he barks, and to the ladies: "Don't
you wish you had her charms?" Of course half the fun is in watching
the theatre played out amongst the audience as teenage boys push
each other forward, little girls giggle, and ladies of a certain
age collapse into laughter when they look through the peephole
to spy on Deloris the Devine, a beautifully crafted puppet of
a certain age who no doubt was once the belle of the ball but
is now a wee bit faded and jaded, but is still there after all
these years, bumping and grinding. Like much good puppetry, it's
all in the detail - Deloris is a delightful creature and I especially
liked her rouged nipples, bouncing pearls and the fag dangling
from her lips.
Pickled Image obviously have
a liking for the mores of traditional public entertainments. Bernard's
Puppet Bonanza is on one level a terrible denunciation of the
sort of bad puppet show seen at many a seaside town. But of course
in order to really subvert a form, you have to understand it -
which is why many a Dodgy Punch Professor piss-take fails and
Bernard succeeds. Our eponymous puppet-master is an old time entertainer;
the last of a dying breed. We hear him before we see him, muttering
and wheezing inside his booth. And what a work of art this booth
is! The mahogany wood with nicotine yellow paper stuck to its
side just perfect; the curtains exactly the right shade of burgundy
red with tell-tale sun bleaching on the creases. There are faded
photos peeling off from the sides, a clock showing the time of
the next show, and when the curtains are eventually drawn back,
we see the booth lit by a pair of lamps with tasselled shades
perched at odd angles.
Bernard is played by Downey,
clad in a grubby suit festooned with lapel badges and sporting
a skewed bow tie. His face is an awful leering gurn of creases
deep enough to grow vegetables in, distended earlobes and saggy
jowls (a beautifully crafted latex mask in play here, I hasten
to add). Bernard is the sort of children's entertainer we sadly
encounter but rarely these days. He smokes a fat Havana cigar,
makes unfunny jokes and spills water down his crotch (or at least
that's what he claims it is). The children sitting on the floor
in front of the booth are of course delighted with him. Much of
the show is the preamble for the show-within-the-show. Once we
actually get going on our puppet entertainment, inevitably everything
that can goes wrong. Bernard loses the plot quite literally, carelessly
shifting us from Red Riding Hood to Three Little Pigs because
once there's a wolf involved there has to be pigs, surely? Things
fall apart, the scratchy music discs are the wrong song or the
wrong speed, and just when there seems to be nothing else to go
wrong, a curl of smoke can be seen at the top of the booth. So
where did Bernard leave his cigar? It's all great stuff, a treat
for all the family, and a particular gift to anyone who loves
puppetry but has spent one too many an afternoon watching geezers
like Bernard plying their trade.
