The Serpent’s Tooth at Shoreditch Town Hall

The Serpent’s Tooth by playwright David Watson is one of the richest new plays I’ve seen all year. Taking its audience to an England under occupation in the tunnels beneath Shoreditch Town Hall, it conjures a land cogently unsure of what it stands for. Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, it looks at what happens after the death of Lear’s daughters and allows the country that exists in their wake to draw on the family’s most disturbing notions of each other.

Dropping us in what seems to be a totalitarian state, it becomes clear that despite attempts at uniformity, “England is grieving” as one seemingly nonchalant guard puts it and nothing here is as it seems. No one is sure of who they are or what they’re doing and as the audience are corralled through vast corridors and tiny rooms, we get to watch them figure it out. The most confused is Abina (the completely absorbing Babou Ceesay), an official who arrives at the prison in which the play is set, to ensure that the villainous Edmund gets a fair trial and is duly punished.

Formal, polite and lacking identification, Abina is keen to prove he’s on side, a servant of the nation as much as anyone else. He comes up against a weasely, loquacious prison warden (witty and unsettling Alexander Campbell) who fiercely guards the elusive Edmund.

Outwitted at every turn, Abina, straddles his loyalty to England and his foreignness which is reinforced by everyone he meets there. At the same time, he struggles with his ideas about fairness and justice. He preaches an ethos for an undecided nation and ends up exacting his own version of trial and punishment.

David’s writing is a perfect example of using Shakespeare as part of our country’s story and continuing a discussion about loyalty and rule that the Bard began. Masterfully he has also created something that doesn’t require previous knowledge of Lear at all. But if you are familiar with the Shakespeare story that spawned The Serpent’s Tooth you can draw on it in the many many ensuing discussions.

There’s way too much to say about the effectively varied female guards (Alisha Bailey, Charlie Covell, Imogen Doel and Olivia Morgan) in his hour-long story to fit into this review but I can tell you that their changing positions reflect a multi-dimensional take on women and force. Similarly,  Edmund is not a simple villain. His charges being so unspecific and compounded point at the boogie man he has become. A cartoon character to depict evil who, once destroyed, will leave England free to be good again.

My one criticism regards the audience. Shepherded by guards, we never really understand why are we there. Are we Edmund’s fellow prisoners? Are we conspirators? Are we rebels? Because to be simply voyeurs of this story in this particular setting, leaves something missing. More structure to the audience role in relation to the talented performers who play the guards is needed. Nonetheless, I really hope The Serpent’s Tooth is given extended life after this run.

The Serpent’s Tooth runs at Shoreditch Town Hall until 17th November

Review: Argo

Argo follows earnest CIA office Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) as he attempts to rescue six people who have evaded the Iran Hotsage Crisis which saw 52 Americans held at the US embassy for 444 days. But the film is torn between the flamboyant American processes used to extract the escaped six in 1979 and their frightening ordeal, so much so that it becomes inflated Oscar fodder that moronically deflects from some of its more interesting subtleties. The epilogue claims director Ben Affleck is keen for his film to highlight co-operation between the US and Canada during this rescue mission, but the overall tone of this film is incredibly gung-ho, only tempered by the modesty of its real-life heroes.

He sets this save-the-day tone by opening Argo with graphic novel-style scenes and there is something disgusting about the way he introduces Iran like it’s Gotham City, with rich princesses who bathe in milk, selfish kings and paupers at the gate. But there is also something fantastically artistic and poignant about his choice of narration style in this segment. It is reductive and simplistic but uses a version of history that wasn’t openly admitted by The States until 2000. Specifically America’s role in the ousting of the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh and the establishment of the monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as political leader in 1953.

But this initial openness makes it more frustrating when the film really begins and Argo focuses on the six “houseguests” living with the Canadian ambassador because it does a terrible job of conveying their very real plight in any original way.

Chris Terrio’s screenplay gives us angry Iranians shouting at them in the market but do we get any subtitles in this scene? Nope. Generally he gives us an idea of how the Americans must have felt, confused and confronted by aggression in an enemy land. But the subtle performances of the brilliant cast, which includes the reliably excellent Victor Garber, Clea DuVall and Tate Donovan among others, do more than enough to convey this without having the mindless angry Arab image rearing its head once more. Subtitles in this scene would have done what that comic strip beginning did quite artfully: mix our contemporary knowledge of Iranians as a people with a voice with the more common images that reflect the events of 1979. This mix, which hits on something that satisfies a contemporary, thinking audience, is severely and symptomatically lacking throughout.

That said, Argo does use its position much better when it looks at the Hollywood men, John Chambers  and Lester Siegel, the make-up artist and producer who set up a fake film production company to provide cover identities for the six houseguests. Playing these wise, disillusioned, hilariously frank men to perfection are John Goodman and Alan Arkin who take us through some wonderfully bizarre images of Hollywood manipulation that combine acute political awareness with the wool being pulled over our eyes. It’s disappointing then, that Affleck has made these scenes seem so out of place in his mediocre film.

His epilogue at the end talks about the incident’s happy outcome as an example of nations working together in a crisis. On this I have two questions 1) Where the shit is his depiction of the no doubt complex Canadian part in all this? And 2) Erm, big picture please?

Review: Ginger & Rosa

The most notable thing about Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa is Elle Fanning’s physical performance. Her depiction of internalised pain, betrayal and confusion is completely captivating and at times, not easy to watch. But the script by director Sally Potter, which lays out an emotional and intellectual coming of age story set in 1962, is frequently cringe-worthy. It means that on most occasions when Fanning is required to speak, you can forgive yourself for rolling your eyes, not just because of her lines, but her oscillating accent which takes us to New Zealand and back. But were she to perform this in silence, you’d get a far superior film to the one presented here.

The script, particularly the dialogue, for this final edit can’t make up its mind about what to foreground. It seems to set up a story about two girls struggling to understand what it is to be a woman and be relevant in the world they live in, all the more interesting because of the period. To Rosa (Alice Englert), it’s why her mother has been abandoned by her father to raise her family on her own, while Ginger (Fanning) is learning a little slower why her mother is so desperately unhappy. She chooses to focus her attentions on nuclear disarmament, becoming swept up in the constant impending doom she feels.

But rather than missiles and bombs, it turns out this feeling is in large part down to her father (Alessandro Nivolli, perfect in this role) who, after Rosa sends him an intimate letter, begins an affair with his daughter’s best friend. Meanwhile, his wife (Christina Hendricks – terrible accent, poor characterisation) becomes a common picture of frustration and heartache while her pacifist, academic husband screws who he wants and takes her for granted.

Were Hendricks to do a better job of communicating this frustration in a less cartoon-like way, and were the script to give her a chance at being a more subtle about it, we might have a superbly focused look at the intergenerational part of women’s liberation. But this isn’t foregrounded and instead bluntly punctates Ginger’s understanding of the Cuban missile crises and nuclear weaponry which is presented in a pseudo-intellectual way.

We know Ginger keeps abreast of the pundits and philosophers, we know she’s angry and scared and trying to make a difference. But between the overt discussion of pacifism vs war in the decades after Hitler’s defeat, there’s so much more which is tragically ignored. The place of America on the global stage is largely forgotten as is the relationship between activists like Ginger’s friends and the wider population. Beyond the incidents of violence depicted between protesters and police, how were people like Ginger viewed by everyone? Was she aware of this? Potter doesn’t seem too fussed and fair enough. She prefers to look at Ginger’s internal struggle with her father and what his actions mean to a girl rapidly approaching womanhood.

While there is a lot to hold your attention during this film, particularly Elle Fanning, this typically arthouse director is trying to create something more accessible and mainstream, and she goes a little too far. It’s easy to applaud her simple storytelling but it doesn’t make this film stand out. Fanning on the other hand totally carries Ginger & Rosa and she’ll get due attention for that.

In Conversation with John Pilger

It is genius to put John Pilger in conversation with a BBC reporter. Tonight at Queen Elizabeth Hall it’s Robin Denselow who is leading the discussion as part of London Lit Fest. Deneslow reports for Newsnight and BBC African Service and does a bunch of freelance work including reviewing world music for The Guardian. He is good lefty company, still very much a part of organisations that Pilger criticises so freely and his presence doesn’t hinder the discussion that streams forth about the history, current state and future of journalism. To listen to the whole discussion, click here. If you don’t have 1hour and 8 mins, read my crudely condensed but hopefully useful notes below.

The evening begins with a short video compilation of some of Pilger’s documentaries from 1970-2007 and the septuagenarian gives the voice of his 32 year-old self a fleeting but pensive glance as clips of his reports from Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor play behind him. His most striking broadcasts are his illegal reports and a few of his boo-yah moments come when he’s pitted against unintelligent, authoritarian voices who show none of the detailed understanding of global politics that he does. They provide some comic relief and it’s an easy way to lionise St John but he’s given us good reason to.

Despite its aim to celebrate his work, there is a sad tone to the reel and part of that is down to the all too familiar pattern of broadcast journalism. The same shots of framed family photos that play while an off-screen parent talks about a dead child are from decades ago. But not much has changed in the formulaic presentation of war, death and destruction which begs the question: have we become numb to this?

Pilger talks about this succinctly, he calls for a different approach to journalism, one that is not lead by party politics (“you cannot be beholden to a state without being an extension of it”), and he says progress will require “a seismic change.”

He draws our attention to the images of brutal irony that act as distraction in both his clips and the ones that run across our screens today. In his report from Cambodia, he kneels near a gutter surrounded by the crumpled banknotes that were swept across the city after the Khmer Rouge blew up the national bank having forbidden an form of currency in the country. It’s poignant  but Pilger reminds us not to rely on such images for a complete understanding, they are not the measure of a good report.

He goes on to talk about being made a major in the US army solely for the purposes of access during the Vietnam war. The access allowed him to report on government and military mistakes and strategies but he highlights the need to ask why and he questions our use of embedded journalism today.

He asserts that a reporter should be someone people trust and someone who has experiences as well as ideas and noting the rise of opinion-based celebrity journalists, he says firmly, “I don’t like the idea of journalism morphing into one long column.”

Such columns are editor decisions and he links those to our use of embedded journalism and talks about granting access to information, as we do with embedded journalism, as a state of mind. He reminds us to question it at every level of journalism, especially the decisions made by editors, who are often  guilty of “rampant censorship by omission.”

He cites the media’s representation of the Iraq invasion of 2003 as an example and calls it a shame on journalism because so little was challenged. The way the public handled information about our actions in Iraq revealed to me, our dependency on broadcast journalism.

A lot of time is spent discussing Julian Assange who Pilger calls “heroic” and Wikileaks, which he says has shamed journalism by alerting us to what journalists should be uncovering. He also lauds it for giving higher (deserved) status to whitsleblowers. Assange’s “treatment in the media”, he says “is a stain on journalism” and he reminds us that the most bitter take on Assange has come from what used to be respectful media outlets.

Talk turns to the Leveson inquiry and what it’s doing to the perception of journalism and the relationship between journalism and the British government . He says Murdoch is being thrown out of the club to make it look like something has changed. But he simultaneously hammers home the idea that journalists and editors should never underestimate the public. “Media is a subject in itself now” he says, “media stories are news stories so let’s not underestimate public knowledge of the media, especially young people”

He does however feel that the usefulness of user generated content (UCG) like twitter is over “utterly exaggerated”, he questions how much it helps us makes sense of things and his response to UGC  units on newsdesks is simply “Oh, what fun!”

When asked about journalism schools, he says they produce “job fodder.” They teach students how to be journalists of a certain kind who produce a narrow form of journalism based on the idea that sources come from above not below.

But he remains optimistic, that new/emerging journalists will navigate through the systems in place and understand them better. That, coupled with the increase of whistle blowers and their status he says“we are in a fortunate era.”

His last warning is about “the most potent force in media” which is how he chooses to describe PR – the term coined by Edward Bernays of Woodrow  Wilson’s government, who believed that manipulation was necessary in society. Public relations is the most obvious and most accepted example of guidance from above.

When it comes to the Q&A, most people who pipe up are just plain irritating but the best question Pilger is asked all night is “What happened to protest?” He blames poorly structured unions and explains that they’ve created their own elites and points out their connections with the labour party under Blair and says that they took away structure to street protest.

He finishes by saying that this is a time for extraordinary transition and urges us to take inspiration from Latin America, to be aware of our country’s “psychopathic” foreign and domestic policies and the fact that protest in this country has been criminalised.

Much Kudos goes to Robin Deneslow for guiding the discussion which was as broad as it was rich and that’s hella rare.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Denselow

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.”

Authenticity and what translators think about: Eva Buchwald on Purge

Written for Spoonfed:

Authenticity and staying true to the text are two elusive issues that often surround translated plays. I can’t help questioning a critic who lauds a play’s authenticity: how do they know? But perhaps I’m wrong to be so doubtful; maybe we have a universal instinct that picks up on the elements of human experience that explains our perception of what’s authentic. But a more logical way of addressing the issue is ask what translators think about when they approach an original text with an English-speaking audience in mind: what constraints do they face? How much of translation is adaptation? And how much inclination do they have to leave their mark on their translation?

Eva Buchwald is a translator and a dramaturg at the Finnish National Theatre where Sofi Oksanen’s Purge premièred in 2007. The play follows two women of different generations: one living during the Soviet occupation of Estonia and the other living with its violent legacy in the ’90s. It explores issues of sexual violence during political conflict and what drives these women to become violent themselves. Purge also highlights the links between language and identity and will have its UK debut at London’s Arcola Theatre from 22nd February.

Eva wrote to me recently about the challenges of translating a play like Purge for an English-speaking audience, which she makes a point of noting is not homogeneous. “The English-speaking world is a vast and variable entity,” she writes. “The effect of a play in translation is probably as unpredictable as the effect of any new play. At the same time on some level, humanity is the same everywhere so I think translators try to convey lucidly whatever is universal in a given work because that is what will resonate with audiences everywhere. In the case of Purge, the play was written by a Finn but none of the characters are Finnish, so there is already a linguistic twist there – even in the play’s native language the characters are ostensibly speaking Estonian or Russian.”

Purge covers the period of occupation in the ’40s under Stalin following German occupation during WWII and its ramifications in the ’90s. It looks at the the effects of the Red Army’s abolition of private farms and the formation of farming collectives. Inevitably, its specific historical and cultural context means it resonates differently in different locations, something that is beyond the translator’s influence. “For Estonians,” Eva explains, “this is a story which cuts very close to the bone – there is a sense of direct identification. A British audience has more distance: not only watching a play about another country, but also from the viewpoint of a nation which did not suffer military occupation in the last century. This doesn’t make the play less powerful, but its point of emphasis shifts.”

“One of the play’s important points is that the violence these women have experienced has led them to be violent themselves,” she continues. “Both have killed and both turn on each other at some point in the play. The two women reflect two different forms of oppression – one by military invasion in a time of war, one by organised crime in a time of peace. But this context is merely a frame for what is essentially a powerful study of human endurance and the consequences of oppression and exploitation.”

The legacy of violence in Purge is integral and something that surpasses differences in language. “Violence, particularly against women,” Eva writes, “is a strategy for maintaining nationalist supremacy – in times of peace as well as war.” But these are human rather than political issues, and “small political references in the text aren’t essential to an understanding of the play’s basic themes. In one scene, for example, one of the main characters talks of escaping to Finland. When the play was performed in America I noticed that it wasn’t clear to Americans that Estonia and Finland do not share a land border but are divided by the Baltic Sea. As a translator this didn’t occur to me as a point that needed clarification and I don’t think the detail caused any great misunderstandings. Although perhaps some missed the humour in the reference to the Baltic as a ‘ditch’.”

But does a translator have much control over these shifts in emphasis and can they still create something unique to them? “There are many factors besides the translation that leave their mark on a text.” says Eva, “As a translator I always try to provide as much insight into the original work as possible even if as a dramaturg (my day job), I may feel certain elements could be cut or modified for a given foreign audience. However, as I don’t yet know my audience when I translate, this is a task which inevitably lies with the director.”

Given that the English-speaking world is as varied as Eva mentions and that context can become a structure used to evoke our universal humanity, it seems the question of authenticity is less about questioning a play’s realism and more about drawing on our shared qualities present at the root of the text.

Purge runs at Arcola Theatre from 22nd February until 24th March

Image: Writer of Purge, Sofi Oksanen by Toni Harkonen

1395 Days Without Red

Written for Spoonfed:

1395 Days Without Red is a project that has spawned two films on the same subject, with the same name, and the same cast in the same setting. Co-director of commissioning organisation Artangel, James Lingwood, describes them as ‘twins’. Twins created from the same cells, split apart and ready to go off in their own direction. As yet, they haven’t developed their own personality and seeing them one after the other, they provide only slightly different takes on the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996.

But their subtle differences are still effective and though only occasionally stark, it is worth seeing both films. They chart a time in which unseen snipers hide in the hills and the upper echelons of imposing buildings, while the population of this ghost city makes its way through bare streets, parks and cemeteries.

Both films look at the notion of observing and being observed. As we watch the old and the young wait patiently, walk briskly, or sit alone we’re reminded by their silence that they too were watched and waited for.

The few words that are spoken are that of American composer Ari Benjamin Meyer as he conducts the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra whose performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique splices the scenes and shows us a romantic, strengthening mode of resilience. Their music hums persistently in the head of the protagonist as she draws courage from it or leans on it for distraction.

Played by Maribel Verdu, she is smart, alert and pushed constantly to decide whether to run or walk. Should she remain in the company of others? Or venture out on her own as she approaches empty junctions where her fellow citizens wait for a safe time to cross. There’s an element of humour here as the middle-aged can never break out of that dad-run that’s more about appearing to get faster than actual speed. But we soon learn that they’re taking a chance by being outdoors at all.

Originally working together, Sejla Kameric, who lived through the siege, and Anri Sala, who grew up in communist Albania, edited their footage separately to create the two pieces. Kameric’s film highlights the human resilience, whilst Sala’s delivers exactly what you dread all through Kameric’s: gunfire. But that for me was the only bald difference. Their other disagreements seem to be about tone and atmosphere.

Both challenge the way we see fact and fiction, and show us the dark things that lurk in parks at night, the things we sometimes believe are really there. But for me, ultimatley 1395 Days Without Red is a lesson in filmmaking as Sala and Kameric demonstrate just what can be achieved in each shot. Pulling away as Verdu approaches the camera almost touching the lens, we’re pulled into the reactions she has to her own internal dialogue, bracing herself for what’s ahead of her. These are very much art films with no real plot, but they’re markedly more accessible than most.