Preview: Arab Nights, Part 1 of 3 (on Language)

Metta Theatre create theatre that insists the audience are included in the telling of a story. From 21st November, they’ll be at Soho Theatre with their production of Arab Nights, a collection of short performances that respond to recent ongoing events in the Middle East and North Africa, giving the audience ultimate power over the protagonist, Shahrazad.

The line-up includes works by Hassan Abdulrazzak, writer of Baghdad Wedding, Egyptian Storyteller Chirine El Ansary, writer and journalist Ghalia Kabbani, live artist Tania El Khoury and Palestinian human rights lawyer and Orwell Prize-winning writer Raja Shehadeh.

The works take their inspiration from 1001 Nights and explore issues that vary from the “security wall” bordering Palestine to the Louboutin’s that belong to President Assad’s wife. We spoke to  Raja, Tania and curator of the event, Poppy Burton-Morgan about the powers of myth in dealing with contemporary politics.

What do you think of the language used in Britain around the subject of the uprisings in the MENA region?
Tania: The uprisings further impress upon the world the need to understand the MENA region and its people on its own terms. Unfortunately, that continues to not be the case as terms like Arab Spring, Arab Awakening, and a host of other phrases used to describe recent developments seek only to perpetuate the plotting of the region and its people on a linear trajectory in which the West is advanced and the rest is behind trying to catch up.

It is not so much about appropriateness or style. It is about the ways in which the language being used seeks to blunt the sharp critique that the uprisings offer about the status quo of the MENA region, the role of Western powers in propping up such a status quo, and the insistence that everyday people in the region are incapable of charting their own path, knowing their own interests, and asserting their own preferences.

Poppy: Semantics is a tricky thing – to allow us to maintain any kind of discourse on the subject we need a shared set of terms by which we can debate. But equally, generalised catch-all terms can and do perpetuate  ignorance. I struggle with the term ‘Arab Spring’ – implying as it does a finite time period (with events having started long before Spring 2011 and continuing to unfold even as I write this in ‘Winter 2012′). One of the ‘Arab Nights’ writers is Iranian, but Iran is not an ‘Arab’ country. And there are significant populations of Arab Christians in the ‘Muslim World’. Ultimately I think it’s vital that we keep interrogating these terms and that we don’t necessarily accept the language of political scientists as the best way to represent the diversity of the subject. Language is often an imprecise tool and equally a constantly evolving one – yesterday’s ‘politically correct’ term can be today’s ‘morally abhorrent’.

Next Question: Other than its setting, what appeals to you about the tales of Shahrazad? will post tomorrow (it’s a long interview)

In defence of star-ratings

They are, as Lyn Gardner put it, a blunt tool but they are a bloody persuasive blunt tool and lemme tell you why I don’t think they deserve the ‘bane of my life’ status so often attributed them by theatre critics.

When I invite my friends to the theatre, I have to convince them to come with me – and not just because my company is sub par but – for two main reasons 1) a lot of my friends aren’t ‘theatre people’ (crude term, hate using it) and they don’t feel welcome at the theatre 2) they’re not convinced the theatre is the best use of their time i.e they haven’t been persuaded enough by what theatres put out there, nor do they have any nostalgia about theatre. As with me, it was completely absent from their childhoods.

Tell them I’ve got a spare film ticket on the other hand, and I can’t give it away fast enough. And, key to this, it rarely matters what film it is I’m reviewing, who’s in it or even what era it’s from. Genre matters, sure. But beyond that they’re willing to experiment, to see new things by artists they haven’t heard of. Their relationship with theatre is so different.

For these friends, star-ratings are an important stepping stone towards where you might want them to be. These are the people who don’t necessarily care enough about theatre (yet) to have a whole conversation with me about a show they haven’t seen but who care enough to ask me what I thought of a play. They get in reply (because remember, I know this won’t be a long conversation): It was ok/ It was really good/ It was brilliant/ and the killer “you should see it” ← and those right there are my star-ratings. They are reductive, they say very little about the play but they are real, they happen in conversations and their value shouldn’t be ignored.

They are the persuasive blunt tool that gets people talking and more importantly, really thinking about going to the theatre. And don’t underestimate those people, that almost audience, because if you get them in and you impress them, you make them feel welcome, they’ll come back with friends, guests and family. They’ll put money up for tickets and give your editor a reason to publish your fantastic critique and they’ll look it up, they’ll chew over your ideas but you have to actually give a damn about them first.

And just as my friends come back to me after they’ve seen a show I once  mentioned to them, to have a longer conversation now that they too have an opinion on it; this emerging audience might well come back to your critique after they’ve seen the show to think about your opinions and maybe, hopefully, offer some of their own.

How should artists respond to reviews?

Last week, the lovely Honour Bayes discovered and shared a series of reviews, collated by theatre critic Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times. The reviews were of the one man show, Critical Mass, created and performed by Ian himself in ’97.

Along with the reviews on his own website – most of them positive – Ian provides “self-serving footnotes” and although these are really supplementing the reviews, they got me thinking about how artists respond to critics, what they think of reviews and how to make and receive a useful response to a review.

For the most part, when I’ve seen responses, they’ve been in written form, published online and they’ve been defensive, snide and/or dismissive (Ian’s footnotes are none of these). However, I have had proper, you know, real-life conversations with theatre-makers about their shows which were a lot less negative but perhaps still not as useful as they could have been for either party probably because of the inclination to be polite from both artist and reviewer when involved in an in-person discussion.

To me, a good review explains how the show felt, what the show made the reviewer think of, questions it made them asks or things it made them reconsider. I think a response to a review should do the same. What did my review make you feel/think/reconsider? Did it affirm anything? Did it piss you off? Why?

So here are some general thoughts about how, if you’re going to respond to a review, you could make the reviewer really think.

Tell me what I got wrong – but accept my opinion
Differentiate between something that can be responded to, figure out where there’s room for discussion or persuasion – this will probably be when I propose and idea or a question or when I make a stab at what your play is trying to say.

It’s kind of pointless responding to an opinion that probably won’t be changed like “I can’t bear Keira Knightley…” but it is useful to point out what others have said if they’ve qualified their opinion. For example, if I’ve said the acting sucked – hopefully I’ll have explained why – feel free to rub in my face how others described the performance as long as they’ve said something more helpful than “fantastic!” or “superb!” – those opinions aren’t useful to me once I’ve formed my own but what did the actors bring to the performance that I missed?

Could your PR agent be useful?
Maybe they have experience with journalists and know which one would be open to discussions and which ones you should probably leave be? It might also be useful to have another person, who is not part of the company, read the review (dunno if your PR is the best person for this but), they could be helpful.

Don’t be snide
We’re grown-ups discussing the point at which our industries meet. Looking clever should not be a priority for either of us. If I’ve said something you think is snarky, you’re in position to point it out and take the higher ground by not retorting. But my job is to be creative with language so I doubt that singling out a metaphor I’ve used would be that helpful.

Ask Questions
I usually think my reviews are crystal clear, I’m probably wrong. Tell me if you think my opinions need clarifying – that’s helpful to me especially if I’ve said something that offends you.

Or you could do what Ian did. I’d be happy to read your “self-serving footnotes”, they’d probably be most helpful of all. And if not, maybe they’ll come with his good humour.

Image by danielle_blue

What’s the point of the post-show discussion?

What’s the point of the post-show discussion?

Who gets what out of post-show discussions? Are they for the audience? Do they benefit the artists? What does audience engagement really mean? What’s made you stay for a post-show discussion? And what’s caused you to pick an aisle seat and make a quick exit before it starts?

The worst kind of post-show discussion is an egotistical one. Are we agreed? One step down is a post-show Q&A where no one really knows what the point is and this happens more often than we’d like to admit.

Outcomes don’t have to be predefined and a lack of focus is usually a good thing but given a little more time and consideration, we could get a lot more out of post-show discussions than we currently do. I think the key lies in figuring out what the artists want to gain from it, what the audience might want to know and creating an environment in which those happily vague aims can be met.

To me, there are a few things that make successful post-show discussion.

The Tone – leave your egos backstage, please.

Tone is possibly the most important thing. This is established by the person who opens the discussion and crucially what they say. At this point the chairperson decides who to make the focus and egos must must must be left at the door. An arse-kissing, eye-roll inducing chair is beyond annoying, they’re off-putting. If you big up the panel too much, the audience might think twice about challenging them and from what I gather, artists gain a lot from being challenged (not mocked, not ridiculed, just challenged). Respect the audience as much as you respect the artists.

The most open discussions are the ones where the chair explicitly states that the panel are gathered to hear opinions from the audience as well as answer their questions. That way, they get to hear the audience’s experience of the show without pressure to respond. It’s ok to just listen.

The  Atmosphere – facilitate a two-way discussion.

The atmosphere is what makes potential participants feel like they can step up to the mic. But if the discussion is taking place in the same space as the show, it requires a shift in atmosphere to establish this relaxed environment. The conventions of a theatre show place the focus on the artists and the audience takes a passive position. Once the curtain falls, the task is to shake this up and give equal importance to both, so there needs to be a change. This could be the seating arrangement, it could be serving drinks in the theatre space itself (licensing issues may be a problem here), or you could change the venue of the discussion. Maybe have it nearer, if not in, the bar (but consider sound).

Have a varied panel
Sweeping statement alert: I think most audience members who stay for a post-show discussion are usually more interested in the subject matter of the show or the opinions of the cast/crew than the  process of making it. They’re interested perspective over methodology (I think). I don’t know if artists share this interest in the experience of a subject over the experience of the theatre show itself?

Either way, it’s a good idea to have someone on the panel who has a view point on the subject but is separate from the show. If your show’s about a banker, consider having a finance expert on the panel like Upstart Theatre did with The Maddening Rain post-show discussion at Salisbury Playhouse.

What makes a poor post-show discussion?
Talking too much and egos. Artists/chairs who go on and on to fill up the silence aren’t doing a great job at a post-show discussion. They’re excluding the audience and fellow panellists by not giving them a chance to talk. It’s the job of a chair to cut someone off when they’re talking too much (I learnt this the hard way).

Any other ideas?

Taking a magnifying glass to the Egyptian Revolution: An interview with Christopher Haydon

“I’ve only been thinking about this in the last week,” says Christopher Haydon, “but I mean 15% turn out!?” This is the artistic director of Gate Theatre on news of Egyptian elections. “You have to compare that with 80% in November,” he continues. “That’s a catastrophic drop. The disillusionment in Egypt is huge.”

Addressing the revolutionary events in January 2011, Christopher’s latest production, The Prophet, written by Hassan Abdulrazzak makes a lot of the experience of those events. The script, inspired by interviews conducted with people in Cairo, follows young engineer Layla. Struggling in a stagnant marriage and frustrated by slow political progress, she places herself in the thick of Tahrir square and is invigorated by it.

With the election stats on his mind, Christopher taps into what creates the changes now symbolised in Tahrir Square. “I hope that people who looked at Egypt in January last year and thought ‘Oh well, of course Egypt’s going to go to shit’, will watch this play and come to think that nothing is inevitable and nothing is irreversible. That energy, that excitement that was felt in those 18 days, that has to be re-found.”

I don’t this is meant as political as it sounds., he’s not looking to create an activist piece of theatre. He’s talking about people, our fallibility and our humanity, the great things we’re capable of and the piss poor state of affairs we allow to continue “It’s about reminding people of where something came from, creating a consciousness that things don’t have to keep going the way they are. It’s not an event, it’s a process.”

But that’s a tall order for an hour and forty minute-show, the programming of which says a lot about Christopher and his vision for The Gate: ‘London’s International Theatre’. Taking over the 70-seater fringe venue in Notting Hill has had Christopher readdressing that tagline. “For The Gate, its internationalism should interrogate what it means to be international. It should look at those processes that shape the world, that drive globalisation, it should look at those forces, those ideas, that engine behind change that gives someone this international perspective. ”

Perspective is what must set The Prophet apart. If it provides a new perspective, it can avoid that overused generic label: topical! To engage with its subject matter and reflect the universal, human capabilities that Christopher is so impressed by, The Prophet has to present a new angle on something familiar. For him, this is the individual and the detail.

“The news coverage is about tens of thousands of people in Tahrir square,” he explains, “it’s about Mubarak stepping down, it’s about the big things. But what you can do in a theatre is take a magnifying glass and find an individual within that and say what was it like for this person? By fictionalising it, you can have more fun as well. For an audience of outsiders like us, it’s about creating something that gives a different way of accessing what happened and the aim of The Prophet was to explore that nexus between those large scale events and the personal ones.”

For Layla and her writer husband Hisham, however, their own independent personal events aren’t just connected to the larger ones, they’re engulfed by them. Ahead of his brutally romantic play Tender Napalm last year, Philip Ridley told me “none of the relationships we have are just about that relationship. They’re always about where we are at that stage in our lives, and how the world is at that stage in our lives.” It seems especially fitting for these two characters within the grey shades of the secular left. Disunited, disconnected “they find their scruples challenged” as Christopher puts it.

“You do have political arguments between characters in the play. Layla’s boss is an old Mubarakite, his argument is look, I’m a Coptic Christian. If the Muslim Brotherhood comes into power then I’m going to be victimised, of course I don’t want them to win, of course I want Mubarak to stay, that’s safer. And Layla, this young radical, can’t stand that her boss is conservative.”

“For me” he says “those conversations aren’t the most interesting.The most interesting thing is when characters crash into themselves and can’t resolve something.”

I’m not sure the two are so different. To me, the former leads to the latter. These specific political arguments are what makes a play stand out. They enable writers to pull the political through the domestic and more often than not, they tap into ideas beyond the specific time and place of their setting. They reveal how a character thinks. Take Chicken Soup with Barley which you can boil down to its family-focused essentials, or read for clues to the decline of socialism in the UK or both. Either way, in Wesker’s play the initial scene that sees a family stare out of a window onto a fascist march in east London is what spurs discussions of beliefs, values, ambitions, priorities and relationships. And these discussion are what cause the characters to crash into themselves.

“In a way,” he reconsiders, “the 15% is brilliant because it shows people aren’t being suckered by what’s happening. Yes, the fact that there is disillusionment with the process could be really bad because it could be a sign that people are retreating into their shells and saying we knew it wasn’t gong to work, we’re screwed. But it could also be a sign that there’s more to come.”

Charles Spencer’s review of Snookered

Charles Spencer, theatre critic at the Telegraph began his review of Snookered with this: “When one thinks of young male Muslims in Britain today, I suspect the first image that comes to mind is of indoctrinated fanatics heading to London from the North with explosives in their rucksacks.”

On his blog, Nimer Rashed takes issue with that sentence and writes: “My problem with these words is not only that they rehearse a dangerous cliché, encouraging and perpetuating a misguided consensus, but also that they’re part of a response to piece of theatre. When our brains start to process an idea, as any writer knows, the first words and images drawn from our imagination are likely to be the least trustworthy, the least original, and the most prone to generalisation. They’re facsimiles of experience: photocopies, counterfeits.”

And yet how many people act on those initial responses?

Nimer goes on to make a fair point when he writes: “The problem with Mr. Spencer’s paragraph is that it takes the complex strands of experience, the connective tissue that links us together, and ties it into a tiny knot of hate. It acknowledges the divisiveness of “us and them” and, in its assumption that this is the de facto consensus, enshrines this oppositional position as absolute.

And it does all this with three little words. “When one thinks” is a pernicious phrase – it encourages prejudice without accountability. The inclusion of “one” (not “I”) carries an entitled assumption that this is the way we think: the common view, the status quo, shirking complexity in favour of cliché. “One” claims to speak for the many, but instead speaks for no-one in particular, and is wholly unaccountable. It is groupthink, and it is extremely dangerous.”

Here’s my take on it. Spencer is a critic. Critics write about “the audience” or “viewers” or “listeners” or indeed “one”, they generalise. They try to tap in to the zeitgeist they perceive and give us an idea of what they like, so that in relation to them we can decide if might like it too. But the only really useful way to do this is for them to be honest and to engage with the art they’re criticising and Spencer has done both of those in his first sentence.

He follows “when one thinks” with “I suspect”. Suspect, not know. He’s taking a risk, talking to his readership as well as making a real effort to understand the play and give his opinions of it a place in the world beyond theatre. In doing this, he has tapped into the theatre zeitgeist and dared to suggest that we might not be as over our prejudices as we like to think – a brave, necessary comment to make in an industry that can be very introspective and stagnant with a muddled view of what progress means.

He proves my point about stagnation when he writes “one longs to learn more about his (Billy’s) affair with a white girl and its consequences.” Now, this theme has been done to death. How much more sensation can be squeezed out of conservative parents and their take on interracial relationships? But Spencer suggests that actually, theatre audiences (along with himself) might like a bit more please. I would hope that’s not true but nonetheless, we need more mainstream critics to be as honest and engaged as Charles is with the first line of his review even if they’re rehashing old clichés we wish were over.

Here’s my review of Snookered.

On Progress: Iqbal Khan

Last week Spoonfed kicked off their On Progress series. It’s an exploration of the question ‘how should we measure progress in theatre?’ At the moment, we tend to hold up a lot of anecdotal and statistical evidence to demonstrate how theatre is progressing and becoming more diverse. I’d like this series of articles to be a collection of thoughts from people who are cited as examples of progress, to garner their thoughts on how we should measure inclusion/progress/diversity.

 Our fist contributor is director Iqbal Khan who had the following to say:

Think of the days of Sir Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond; we are not there now and it’s a shame. It’s a shame that theatre doesn’t feel more radical. It’s feeling more and more chic and we could do more to encourage the other voice to be other, to be true to its otherness.

For instance the play I’m doing now, Snookered, is written by a taxi driver [Ishy Din] and he keeps talking about how ignorant he is of the theatre business and how much he has to learn. He’s written a play that is extraordinarily vital. It’s true to the voices of the people that he grew up with. Now, he could learn something about structuring his play but there’s nothing he needs to learn about the voices of the people in his play because that’s got nothing to do with taste; it’s to do with truth.

But he feels intimidated a little into making sure the theatrical establishment welcomes his voice. I think actually they need to ensure that he understands he doesn’t need to do that, that they need his voice more than he needs theirs. Everything I can say to him in terms of guiding him in that journey is to try and protect his individuality. He’s written four parts for young Asian actors that are incredibly muscular, complex and unsentimental.

One of the things Nicholas Hytner first talked about when he took over at the National was interrogating the idea of what a ‘national’ theatre is, whether it’s necessary, and who and what it represents. That kind of ambition being explicitly stated and being up for debate is the sort of ambition that big theatre venues need to continuously engage in. And it’s a threat, it’s intimidating, but it’s necessary if it’s going to keep the form urgent and question pervading ideologies.

Wesker wrote about what the ambitions of theatre should be. He said you judge the quality of a piece not by its situation, not by the event dramatised within it, but by the quality of a writer’s perception of that event. That’s what makes something profound and timeless. It can be set anywhere – Rome, Athens, Birmingham – but the quality of the perception is what lifts it beyond the ordinary.

The press’ responsibility here is ridiculously important and divisive. Increasingly, their reporting is to do with the celebrity, the new and the sensation rather than the important, the significant and the nuanced. That applies to reviews as well as profiles of new artists etc. They’re always looking for what they suggest are radical profiles of artists but it doesn’t strike me as being radical, it strikes me as being chic. The celebrity thing absolutely pervades the way the world of theatre is written about and dramatised in the papers. We don’t have nuanced debate any more.

That said, there’s such a pressure to get audiences in and we’re in such a vulnerable place financially I’m not surprised that marketing and PR companies are used in the way they are being used. There’s a greater and greater reliance on trying to use any avenue to get audiences in. But I think its also the responsibility of a venue to encourage a more considered debate within the media. How we do that, I don’t know, but it needs to come from the top down.

Pigeon-holing, for example, is still an enormous issue and there are a lot of misconceptions about things like Asian theatre. I think that there’s an idea that there is an “Asian theatre”, that there’s a particular form that companies like Tamasha and Tara Arts engage in, and I don’t think they do. They just make theatre. The subject matter might change, the nature of the stories might be to do with experiences had by Asians, but I don’t think even that should be a brief of theirs. The only importance of them being identified in that way is to sort of say, well that is the profile of the people making the work, that is not the profile of the work but it says something about the historical, the cultural, the political background that the artists have been informed by.

This what theatre does for me more effectively and more uniquely than any other art form: it puts ideas and argument at the centre of the entertainment experience, and that needs to be celebrated and encouraged. Most people who work in theatre have a complex sense of otherness. There’s not a lot of money in this profession and people tend to persist with it because they have to. They need to ask questions and continue to interrogate things. It’s ironic that ultimately I think if we are only celebrating difference for the sake of difference, it’s not just reductive, it’s also going against what a form like theatre can do; which is to demonstrate the human parallels that transcend time, borders, race and age. Those are the sorts of things in a play that make you vibrate in sympathy with the other, as it were.

In conversation with Naima Khan

Snookered runs at Bush Theatre from 28th February – 24th March 2012

If you’d like to suggest an artist or get in contact about the On Progress series, email theatres@spoonfed.co.uk

Is it important to review the reviews?

The Guardian Theatre Blog recently highlighted The New  York Times Critic Watch, an  experimental attempt to find out what a review really does for a play. The people behind the project ask a lot of questions including “What does a review do for the play independent of the production?” but they go about their experiment with a lot of numbers. If their questions went beyond theatre and if they looked at it as subjectively as the reviews themselves, they might be onto something.

When I interviewed Ovalhouse artistic directors Rebecca Atkinson-Lord and Rachel Briscoe about their Lady-Led Season, I asked them how they’d like it to be remembered. Rebecca’s answer highlighted the intelligence of the audience. “We’re more sophisticated consumers of media now,” she said “we don’t need to talk about theatre in simplistic ways. I’d like this season to be recorded as a ‘turn’, so we can identify that this is how we’ve tended to talk about it in the past, and this is how it’s changing.” Rachel added: “I’d like it to be recorded as a series of questions. I’d like people to say ‘why do I feel like this when I hear this word?’”

Ultimately though, reviews are how we have chosen to record those transient moments on stage. In doing so, our appreciation for the descriptive word stretches far but I think sometimes we fail to realise the importance of our choice words as a record of how theatre, its content and its language, is received in our times. And it’s their status as a record that makes reviewing the reviews (particularly those of new plays) so important. Theatre critics, especially those published in national publications do – however reluctantly – identify with a cross section of society (that’s part of the reason they are paid to write for large readerships) and comparing and contrasting their reviews reveals how society deals with new ideas. Granted, this way of looking at reviewing the reviews is reductive and subjective and it gives way more weight to a critics opinion than perhaps even they would like, but that’s why we need a varied bunch of critics out there: so that when we do compare their reviews, it shows they’re not all the same.

The Guardian’s What to Say About column takes a stab at collating reviews, but it’s generally meant in jest and misses an opportunity to be a real game-changer, choosing instead to be cursory and occasionally amusing. It tends to follow hype and covers big West End revivals or shows with celebrity names attached. It also tends to look at what has impressed the critics rather than – as Rachel might – look at what questions it has made them ask.

I’ve only seen the What to Say About column prove its potential on one occasion: when it looked at the reception of Bola Agbaje’s Off The Endz. The play, which opened in February 2010, looks at the aspirations of three adults, having grown up on The Endz as part of  black community in London and the reviews revealed an interesting picture of how theatre aficionados receive black/urban identities.

On the other hand, Whatsonstage.com often produces a much better comparison in their Reviews Round-Up piece. Theo Bosanquet among other WhatsonStage.com writers, usually (though not always) selects quotes that reflect on the content of the production that has impressed the critics and gives their take on the wider context of the play.  See his selection of quotes on Tricycle Theatre’s Riots for a good example.

I’ve haven’t quite got round to it yet but a recent play that really deserves its reviews reviewed is Fog at Finborough Theatre. Here are two quotes that struck me:

Michael Billington in the Guardian

“I found it hard to credit the friendship of Michael, an aspiring, Oxford-bound psychology student, and the hapless Fog….Like one of the white boys in Roy Williams‘s Lift Off, he affects the Jamaican patois of his one friend, Michael. His tough-guy stance and gangsta-rap speech, however, fool neither his pugilistic dad nor his sister, Lou”

Rev Stan
“On the back of the play text it says Fog is about two contrasting families one white and dysfunctional and one black and aspirational but I don’t think this is its strength or really the heart of it. It is Fog’s story and a story about the impact of abandonment and the care system.”

Alternative BAFTA nominations

Written for Spoonfed:

Who on Earth let Claudia Winkleman draw up the list of BAFTA nominations? Or did the British Academy once share a cell with Hollywood and is it now trying to make up for all the inappropriate touching?

This year’s shortlist is shockingly devoid of good British films and looks like something created by someone who spent a year at Cineworld, not film aficionados who have access to all the world’s film festivals. That’s every film festival, anywhere in the world. Its only saving grace is that in this, the year of The Gos, the boy Ryan seems to have been overlooked though Driveappropriately has not. Anyhoo, here are our suggestions for alternative nominations:

Best Film- Weekend
How, oh how did The Descendants make it onto this list? The unconquerable George Clooney is probably the answer to that. While it’s not as gritty as we like to think our tastes are, The Help gets our nod of approval as does Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but we much prefer Andrew Haigh’s naturalistic take on relationships – that’s relationships not romance – in Weekend. Not only has Haigh created two singular characters but he shows their relationship absorbing the state of the world it exists in. He also edits his footage into something intimate, bordering on invasive and simultaneously, sweetly affectionate.  The film also boasts two flawless performances from actors Chris New (soon to star in The Pitchfork Disney) and Tom Cullen.

Outstanding British Film- Junkhearts
OK, this is a decent list we’ll admit. But save Senna, they’re all pretty predictable nominations. We Need to Talk About Kevin? Tick. Shame? Tick.Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy? Tick tick tick. What’s missing from the list is Tinge Krishnan’s Junkhearts. Sure, nobody went to see it but this bravely artistic feature debut leaves a stubborn aftertaste. Her characters are both endearing and frighteningly cruel and her ability to draw us into their chaotic mindsets has been unrivalled this year.

Adapted Screenplay - Trishna
The Descendants again? Really? And Ides of March? Will Clooney ever use his powers for good? Michael Winterbottom’s take on Tess of the D’urbervilles deserves to be on this list. He’s been incredibly clever about making Trishna, his India-set version of an English classic, relevant to both countries and taps into the contemporary relevance of their colonialist history. The cinematography is a perfect mix of matter-of-fact and atmospherically romantic, but still a million miles away from Hardy’s English idyll.

 

Image by Gareth Cattermole

Cardboard Citizens – Collective theatre for collective change

“But is this progress!?” yells Terry O’Leary. The Associate Artist at Cardboard Citizens stops a performance that’s struggling to keep its head above water, to ask two questions in one. Firstly, is this play worth continuing? And secondly, are the characters in the play bettering their situation? The former at least is asked by many an interval opportunist and it’s refreshing to hear it from a theatre maker exposing the form and utilising it unashamedly for a direct, focused purpose without shedding any of its art.

The answers Terry elicits come from us, the audience, in this forum theatre production of Bola Agbaje’s Three Blind Mice. Agbaje has created the first act of a play that follows three characters on the fringes of society struggling to make their lives work, having been placed in housing after living on the streets. The funny, versatile actors have all had experiences of homelessness and the challenges their characters face are as disconcerting as they are enlightening. As a collective, the audience select one storyline to explore further.

Tonight we choose to see what will happen to alcoholic Sean whose co-dependent relationship with an abusive, domineering friend hinders his chances of shaking up his stagnant life. When asked how the play should progress, I feel stumped. Terry asks us to think about the resources Sean could use, the people he could turn to and the assertive action he might take himself. I don’t have a practical answer for any of this but my fellow audience members are willing to take a chance. Up on stage, they give their suggestions and take on the role of Sean while the other actors improvise their way through the suggested scenes.

On this occasion, the suggestions put Sean in counselling, they see him pretend to hook up with a woman before comes on to his best friend and finally see him remove himself from an ugly situation before turning to a housing officer for help. The audience and the superb actors take us through scenes that are awkward, difficult, hilarious and finally satisfactory.

Terry’s question about progress celebrates forum theatre’s strengths: its ability to be funny,entertaing and simultaneously open about utilising theatre for social change. Cardboard Citizens’ plans to take the play on a hostel tour is simply a practical, artistic use of theatre that highlights successfully the audience contribution as much as the theatre makers and their chosen subject matter and it works brilliantly.