(mostly) theatre
(mostly) in London
sometimes for Exeunt Magazine
and draws pens with the pens he is drawing as Pens by Pens.
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Farnelli and the King opens with a reclining Phillippe V, pushed onstage by courtier while he tries to catch a goldfish from its bowl with a rod and line. Mark Rylance, utterly at home as the Spanish king, mumbles quietly, every half-thought crossing his face. He knows he’s dreaming: “Who would fish out of a goldfish bowl except in a dream? There’s every fear in this opening scene that Rylance – capable of effortlessly charming 95% of any audience irrespective of character – could be on auto-pilot here. However, in this role, written for him by Claire van Kampen, his uncanny powers are put to excellent didactic use, making us hugely empathetic to the depressed king at the beginning of the play, before the text turns on the king, and us, by association.
To cheer the king, absent too long from affairs of state, his unpopular queen Isabella (Melody Grove) recruits the Italian castrato singer Farinelli, to lift his spirits. The man’s sweet, high voice rouses the king from slumber, and indeed, rouses his spirits. The king is horrified and fascinated at the story of Farinelli’s castration at ten years old, by his own brother: “That is too old, and also too young for such brutality”, and finds in the celebrated singer some of the sadness he finds in the role of king. But the king needs to hear the singer again and again, and sickens without his company, and so Farinelli’s stay lengthens, and the calm he brings gives new ideas to the king about a way for him to escape his duty.
These early scenes establish, sometimes quite mechanically, a ‘friendship across the privilege divide’ narrative reminiscent of Pizarro and Atahuallpa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, or even Hamlet and Yorick, i.e. one that is made to look considerably more even and reasonable than it is, despite one party having all the power. Philippe says cheerfully to Farinelli: “Here’s a fine game. I ask you questions. If you answer correctly you don’t get your head cut off.” But because Rylance is so damned engaging, it’s only into the second half that the impact of the king’s whims and moods is fully clear, and it is Farinelli and the sidelined Queen whose relationship is foregrounded. The king depression is genuine, and Farinelli does bring him some peace, but there is no two-way street here. The obsession of the king with Farinelli’s genital mutilation, both pitying and playful, whilst still demanding the sound of that unnatural voice for his own pleasure, becomes more and more uncomfortable.
That voice poses a considerable difficulty in the conception of the play – an incredible otherworldly voice, must be matched with a nervous young man emoting serious childhood trauma who can act opposite Rylance, and pull back some of that audience sympathy in his direction. To separate the man from the voice - might seem a disappointing last resort when staging other talented characters, but here countertenor Iestyn Davies’ appearance alongside Sam Crane when the character is required to sing fits exceptionally as an interpretation of a text. In their first meeting the king asks the singer if he is famous, and he replies, “No. Farinelli is famous”. Decked in identical costume and mirroring each other’s movements, Sam Crane’s face fills with emotion as he watches his double sing with a voice with which he does not fully identify. It would be a loss to the production and the play, to confine these two performances to a single performer.
Farnelli and the King is the first production I have seen in the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and my thoughts about the production and the theatre are a little difficult to extract from one another. But it seems to me that the virtue produced from the necessity of dividing Farinelli from the Castrato (as they are credited), is related to the Globe Theatre’s exploration of the concept of original practice. The thing that elevates companies which have a relationship with ‘original practice’ (and a relationship is all anyone can have with the notion) above curio status is the aestheticising of restraint, the moments of gold produced without professional lighting, in bulky costume, shouted to an audience three stories up, while a plane goes overhead. Inside, the raising and lowering of candelabras to change the size of an onstage room is better than any fade triggered by a ‘Go’ button to the same end. It’s the same thing that many students do when they demonstrate the beauty to be found in the right cardboard prop, when designers make one stage block do the work of two, and when anyone makes work on a shoestring, and on stage that shoestring becomes Odysseus’ bowstring.
The central performances from Crane, Grove and Rylance complicate the beauty of Davies’ singing, elevating an admittedly underpowered text to a thoroughly engaging evening. Although a chamber piece in many aspects, Farinelli and the King makes us complicit in the business of kings, and their cure.
Until 8th March.
For Exeunt.
We’re casting our reading of my play AD LIBERATION this week, and I’m very excited to get into the rehearsal room. But looking at potential Greers and Mailers – the big personalities going head-to-head retelling the backstage wrangling and the media excitement that surrounded their town hall debate in 1971 – has made me think back through the various challenges of writing real people into a play.
At first it’s a joy to immerse yourself in researching an event of such specificity of time and place, to feel the simultaneous urgency and pettiness of history, and to play with voices and vocabulary you wouldn’t get to explore in a modern setting. Better than this, there is a great freedom afforded by visiting a new place and a new time, and discovering familiarity in the not-here and the not-now – in my case, finding the same tactics amongst the New York literary scene’s discussions on women’s liberation as in the modern comments section beneath any article on feminism.
But where does research end and writing start? History is a less rigorous medium than story, and when developing new writing character, backstory, and action often develop simultaneously, convenient details accumulating as they are needed. When working from history, however, you have a patchwork of details relating to character, backstory and action – like the first days after learning a new word where you see it used everywhere, I (poor thing) see Mailer and Greer everywhere I look: from a rerun of The Simpsons to the latest viral news (more on that below). With all that material you need to choose what stays and what goes, what can be built on, what is superfluous. One process is additive, like painting, the other more like whittling. It’s wonderful to try to keep pace with fiercely intelligent characters and work out how to bend real episodes of their lives to a character arc, but it’s tough to recognise when research has taken you as far as it will. You cannot draw a line under research which involves real people, and say, ‘now I will instigate my interpretation’. The process is closer to a hermeneutic circle: a constant evaluation of your work with reference to your research – ‘Is this still in keeping with what did, or could have happened?’ – and reference to your inspiration – ‘Am I still exploring questions that are relevant now?’. As I moved through drafting the work, I necessarily shifted my focus from one kind of veracity to another – rather than checking whether a detail is in keeping with my research, I began to check whether a detail was in keeping with the world of the play I had created – related but distinct. Ultimately, it was when I allowed myself to take a little ownership over my Germaine and Norman, that the piece finally got written, after over a year of stopping, starting, and renegotiating.
You don’t tell people that you’re writing a play about Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer without them wincing at one name, or the other, or both. They are familiar enough characters that people bring their own preconceptions to the table. But they are not so well-known in enough detail that they support caricature (which is a damn shame because Jon Brittain and Matt Telford’s exceptional Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho – coming to the Leicester Square Theatre in March! – has basically taught us that the best way to reimagine history is through drag, cabaret and parody). Moreover they are desperately divisive. I have found perverse enjoyment in writing the irascible and wry voice of Norman Mailer and navigating the violent and witty rhythms of his speech, but like C.S. Lewis taking on the sarcastic voice of a minor demon in The Screwtape Letters, you just have to stop and shudder thoroughly every so often. Norman, however, is the easier part.
As with Peter Morgan’s 2008 Frost/Nixon, at the time of writing one of my historical inspirations for this play is dead (Mailer died in 2007), but the other is very much alive, and in my case, ill-disposed to seeing herself onstage. Germaine Greer considered Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2008 West End comedy The Female of the Species an attack, given that it was inspired by an episode of Greer’s own life where she was held briefly captive by a student in 2000. Murray-Smith’s play didn’t even use Greer’s name (although the production team weren’t afraid to make the connection), but here I am, wading into a period of history and a wave of feminism I didn’t live through, using Greer’s name, her reported and recorded speech, and imagining events from her life to suit my purposes. I hope that Greer would not say of my portrayal of her what she said of Murray Smith – that ‘she holds feminism in contempt’ – but given that she didn’t actually read or see that play, my rehearsed reading is probably safe from her ire. Bring on the West End transfer and we’ll see what exciting quotations I can generate.
In fact, the opposite problem is more likely to befall me – that audience members will find in my protagonist too kind a portrait of a feminist who has fallen from favour. I find much to admire in the Greer that I have watched, read and researched from the years around the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970 – finding a consummate media personality who operated both with and outside of the mainstream feminist organisations of the second-wave, who saw feminism in the context of the world as well as the West and who was willing to part company with some of her sisters and recognise that women’s liberation and gay liberation were ‘part and parcel of the same movement’. But with frequent reports of transphobic comments she has made in recent years, Greer looks, like other TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), increasingly out of step with mainstream feminist activists. The radical feminist distrust of (especially MTF) transgender people dates to as early as the 1970s, but it is not simply a generational issue (as if that would stand to excuse TERF opinions which range from thoroughly insensitive to out-and-out hate speech): another second-wave activist who features in AD LIBERATION – Gloria Steinem – recanted in 2013 her own earlier writing which had been read as transphobic and came out strongly in support of transgender people: ‘what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of “masculine” or “feminine” and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression’. Greer has not made any such re-evaluation.
Popular though she was when she stood up in front of New York’s writers, critics and activists in 1971, Greer never represented the mainstream, and never wanted to. My play is about not about Greer’s feminism then, or today, or the feminism of the women who encouraged her not to engage with Norman Mailer in 1971. Their beliefs, their passions, and their instincts are the vehicle for me to write about debate and argument, the mess of decisions we make when we try to advance the causes and opinions we hold dear, and the torrent of bullshit we have to navigate. I believe I have chosen the right vehicle – precisely because it’s strewn with rubbish, because the engines still fire us up and because there are two massive personalities, difficult and charming, scrapping and making on the back seat.
The rehearsed reading of AD LIBERATION is on 9th March at the Bread and Roses Theatre in Clapham.
For Mingled Yarn.
I really like hummous. I really like Haribo Tangfastics. And although they seem to be very distinct pleasures, in the spirit of experimentation you try things, and they turn out to be brilliant together. Seriously, try dipping Tangfastics in hummous. Other times, you think things that you love, like the seaside and sandwiches, should work together, and you end up spitting gritty tuna and bread into the sea and wondering why you were excited about either thing in the first place.
Megalopolitan is a combination of spoken word, video projection and electronic music which purports by its title, some of its marketing and some of its content to be about cities and life therein. And I was well up for that. The opening is promising, with the promised shadow puppetry and video work preparing us for an aesthetic and theoretical interrogation of the city. But a po-faced execution throughout, and a limited exploration of the various media at hand left me irritated, and one or two stand-out sections don’t quite rescue the whole from feeling unsatisfying.
Part of the problem is one of simple comprehension. Karis Halsall’s voice pervades the piece, in both pre-recorded and live sections. However, after the differentiation of two promising early characters – an anxious young woman on a train and a yoga instructor nightmarish mantra – it is almost impossible to tell her other segments apart. The fact that the gaps between Halsall’s pieces are filled with more of Halsall’s pre-recorded narration is even more confusing. It is embarrassing to commit this to digital print, but two of the characters promised in the marketing copy (a hoarder and a nun) I could not identify at all after the show. I was still looking for the first character to come back around, that fidgety woman looking at a more successful-looking fellow passenger, whose introduction at the top of the show created a mystery and promised a narrative. She sets up the restless panic of city life, which is contrasted in tone by the second piece, the yoga instructor, whose calm delivery nevertheless belies the tenor of her words, leaving us in that same violent unsettled mood as the first. On these textual clues, a set of expectations are created, which are subsequently not met – that we are interested in the internal life of city-dwellers, the effect of the megalopolis on those megalopolitans. But the city retreats from centrality, and the other sections are shrouded in indistinct voices, unreadable characters and suggestions of plots unwritten, unresolved. The only unifying textual element is unhappiness, ranging from regret to full-blown misery.
Halsall’s work is just one half of this collaboration under Alex Crampton’s direction, and Samuel Organ’s electronic music is one of the real attractions of this piece. I love knob-twiddling, and found isolated moments of the creative collaboration exciting – the audible live-adjustment of a delay effect in step with Halsall’s utterance of a single word – ‘dragged’ was a real highlight, and the live pitch shifting of her voice up and down a register to differentiate dialogue during one section was something I hadn’t seen before – but again, the mixture of pre-recorded and live music largely left me cold, with a few interesting themes largely giving way to familiar arpeggiated Vangelis. Also, the lighting that carefully ebbs and flows across the stage between Halsall’s different ‘live’ sections is stubbornly resisted by the insistent luminescence of Organ’s laptop’s logo. Cover the apple up, everyone. It should be your first job. A piece of gaffer works. Or a fancy case. Please. Own your own stage.
After the show it occurred to me that I may have missed the point of this show about ‘enlightenment and information overload’. Hadn’t I been overloaded with character and plot, unresolved to the point of mental shutdown and, let’s be honest, curmudgeon? Perhaps what I found unsatisfying is actually part of the argument of the show – finding in an ever more connected cityscape only fragments of stories, snatches of video and moments of virtuoso creativity drowned in the drone of jealousy, fear, stock footage, Twitter and branding – the distance between us even when we are, as humans, collaborating so intensely? Perhaps the show is meant to be a bit of grit in the craw, and refuse to go down easy, like the sand in my ‘wiches. But I suspect Halsall and Organ want to hit us hard, to show us our high-rise lives and wrap them round in word and chord, individuals all megalopolitans, and instead I emerged from the Cage at the Vaults needing to reset, to remind myself how much I love the Southbank and the city, that the frustrations and sadnesses of a conglomeration such as London are offset by its immediacies, its intricacies and its life.
18th-22nd February 2015
For Exeunt.
At the opposite end of the year from August, the Vault Festival this year feels like nothing so much as an Edinburgh venue in full swing, and the appearance of Ruaraidh Murray’s one-man show from the 2012 Fringe completes the effect. While set partly in London and developed and directed by Theatre 503’s Paul Robinson, Big Sean, Mikey and Me is Scottish through and through, and since 2012 Murray has toured Scotland, telling the stories of his childhood, his hero Mikey, and “the king Scotland never had”, Sean Connery himself.
Murray’s shaggy dog delivery is endearing and energetic, moving between Murray’s career as a struggling actor, letters and visits to Mikey in prison, childhood episodes at school and in the world of casual gangs and football firms of Edinburgh, and his funny exchanges with his self-confessedly terrible impression of Connery, who gives him ocshasional advishe, amid more frequent joshing.
The piece unassumingly reveals itself as a personal investigation of masculinity, with suave Connery’s wry interjections set against the friendship of Mikey and Ruaraidh, which develops through abortive street fights, trouble with the authorities, pub culture, gym culture, and their correspondence after Mikey is incarcerated. Because we don’t experience this in chronological order, and so many questions go unanswered – we know Mikey died in 2008 but we aren’t told the circumstances of his death, when or why he was convicted, or when he left prison – the narrative constantly frustrates a sense of causality. The piece is less argumentative than descriptive, although Murray does draw attention to the negative effect prison life had on Mikey’s lifestyle – “the drinking, the smoking, the drugs, he picked that up in prison”.
Murray tells us that his imagined relationship with Sean Connery is a theatrical device, but it stands alongside episodes where he does hear voices, where he references years lost to alcohol and coke, a long battle with mental illness, and a suicide attempt. It is a play which summons up a desperate picture of masculinity and with the wise-cracking Connery impression it renders the role models available to boys and men impotent – two-dimensional caricatures whose advice extends to suggesting anal sex. However the work doesn’t quite take ownership of its conclusions. Where it remains a personal homily, I wanted Murray to be angrier and more argumentative, and to draw attention to the systematic failures that led to the episodes of his and Mikey’s life that he describes. After seeing so many audiences, and meeting men and boys throughout Scotland, I suspect and hope that Murray and Robinson have more to share, and with a screenplay based on the play in development, they may have a chance to.
4th-8th February 2015
For Exeunt.
Steven Younkins is a web-cartoonist and a sound designer at Maryland Ensemble Theatre who writes Q2Q Comics featuring a sound designer who shares his name, a stage manager called Morty and a lighting designer known as Wuggles. I’ve been emailing him over the last week or two to get a sense of the theatre he’s involved in, and the response he’s got to his comics.
David Ralf: Do you feel part of the webcomic community?
Steven Younkins: I’ve actually thought about this a bit. I feel pretty disconnected from other webcomic creators and the comics community at large. I feel like people that enjoy comics in general probably aren’t going to latch on to Q2Q unless they’ve already got a tech theatre background. For as silly as they are, most of the strips require some level prior tech theatre knowledge.
DR: The territory is more defined in Q2Q than other webcomics. And so maybe the reader is also more defined? Tech theatre geeks as opposed to the more generic geek experience that most webcomics speak to? Is it perhaps less about technical knowledge than the specificity of the implied reader?
SY: When starting Q2Q, I set out to make a theatre comic and I veered off in a tech direction because that is my background. I’ve got readers that work in many different fields from live sound to cruise line entertainment, but most with that common thread of performance and production. With that, I’ve also reached readers of a variety of educational and experiential backgrounds. High school, college professional, union.
DR: There’s some sort of barrier to entry with strips like this – but comics like XKCD and SMBC have frankly impenetrable mathematics, programming and graph jokes. For the most part that hasn’t impaired my enjoyment of those strips – in fact it has made me seek out bits of knowledge to understand them. Google’s right there, in a way that is never quite so true of a syndicated newspaper strip.
SY: As the internet becomes a series of social networks, content like mine is better able to find its home. After discovery, Google is not as important as social networks. A person can read my comic and recognize those among their friends that will appreciate it, tag them or share it with them instantly. I can make a comic with such a clear niche and make it work because my readers are so active in sharing it with their friends and colleagues.
The first dozen or so comics were definitely written for that small group, and then the characters started to define themselves more clearly and I depended less and less on those people for the foundation of my comic.
I don’t think that every strip I’ve written is so backstage elitist that it’s inaccessible for everyone. You don’t have to be an expert in any field to get it. I’m hardly a sound design expert, I’ve stage managed once, and I’ve hardly even touched a light board. But I’ve been around it and I’ve got a sense of the culture that I’m trying to reflect. So much of what I’m poking fun at is situational. I’ve got friends that are not theatre people who have read my strips and tell me that it reads like a bunch of jokes you had to have been there for, which I suppose is why it works for my readers because most of them have been there. Sometimes the situations are funny on their own, and the barrier is very low, and other times the situation is exceedingly specific, so specific that Google isn’t going to help you.
One of my favourite parts of making this comic happens right after I update and the comments roll in with people saying they’ve been in those situations before or they’ve always wanted to say or do whatever I’ve written. It keeps the tech experience from being isolating. There’s only one stage manager in a show and it is sometimes difficult to find and develop a sense of community among others who have shared similar experiences. That Q2Q provides that for some people makes me supremely happy.
DR: You link through to David Lovelace’s 25-way Rock Paper Scissors in Q2Q #23 - have you corresponded with him at all?
SY: I’ve read through a lot of Lovelace’s work, but he and I have never spoken. I haven’t reached out to him or anything like that. I had known for a while about the RPS 25 game (and beyond. He goes up to 101 which is a fascinating logic puzzle in its own right). I felt it was more likely that’d Steve and Wuggles would intentionally use something more complicated for their decision making process.
DR: That to me seems like a perfect example of how a webcomic can be different to a syndicated strip – you link out to something like that – the experience of browsing those pages becomes almost part of your strip. Or those pages are contextualised by the idea that Steve and Wuggles would be the kind of people to invent/use the system.
SY: It’s straight out of the infinite canvas playbook. I can direct and influence how people understand and interact with my content by juxtaposing it with other content. Admittedly, I don’t do that often, but I love that options like that are available to creators of online content.
DR: What strips have influenced Q2Q?
SY: I was raised on Peanuts and Foxtrot, Sunday paper, syndicated kind of stuff. Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite strip, though. As for webcomics: I’m a huge fan of Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots. I could give you a giant list of webcomics creators whose work I admire, but that’s a little off topic.
DR: Okay, not a giant list – but a couple more you really love?
SY: All right, here’s a short list: Girls With Slingshots, Buttercup Festival, Octopus Pie – I’ve got all kinds of style envy for Meredith Gran’s work - Questionable Content, XKCD, SMBC and The System
I’ve never been a fantastic visual artist or anything, so it’s a little difficult for me to catalog it. I firmly agree with Scott McCloud’s assertion that “good writing covers bad art better than good art covers bad writing.” So I’ve spent more time honing my writing craft, you know, figuring out how to pack content in to the space restrictions of the strip, than I have spent trying to be the best artist.
DR: La Ropasucia feels like a nod to Calvin and Hobbes somehow. The world and the imagined worlds of Calvin and Hobbes always seem so massive and excitable – like it couldn’t divide down into static panels, but of course that’s the only way we experience it. Tell me about those restrictions in a three- or four- panel strip, as you find it.
SY: I love the comic strip as a medium. I am a student of the form. I enjoy the way that the restriction of space forces me to be a more concise and efficient writer. It’s a struggle that I only sometimes win. I think that comics are very theatrical. In writing, I often equate the panel with the proscenium and I get to direct my own micro-productions where all that’s supposed to be offstage is onstage.
I usually script the comic first, sometimes it’s a sketch, others just dialogue and then find where the logical divisions are in it. With comics, you can’t always shoehorn in every single word you want to say into such a small space and you have to make cuts. Sometimes I find that I can show more in Morty’s facial expressions than I could ever effectively write, and other times there are panels that need to be crammed with dialogue. There are also times when I’m beating my head against the desk because I can’t make sense of any of the ideas in my head, so instead of trying to get a script first, so I’ll draw out three or four panels and just picture the characters moving about the space and something interesting usually comes out.
DR: With reference to my favourite take-home from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics - how do you find you use the gutter when you write and draw Q2Q?
I use the gutter mostly to separate moments, either to make them more easily digestible or to draw focus to this or that. I rarely allow anything that is not text to violate the gutter. I think Wuggles’ hair breaks the border once, and a sledgehammer. I definitely use them when I need starkness in contrast, particularly for the last panel of any comic that starts with “O.K. People,” when Morty switches from “you’ve all ruined everything forever” to “THANKS!” with a sickeningly sweet smile. I try not to define my panels in such a way as to chop up my moments too finely, either.
Tangent: If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Improv, it’s that there’s a huge difference between writing something comedic and telling a joke. Though the strip is occasionally gag oriented (#26, #51, #63, anything with La Ropasucia, etc.), I do my best to steer clear of telling jokes and instead focus on the situations and connections to make it funny. When I do tell a joke, I try not to use it as the punchline of the strip (#8, #14,#55, #115, #120).
DR: Did you have other writing experience before you started on Circ Jockeys?
SY: I have been writing comics since I was in high school. In undergrad I wrote Circ Jockeys and editorial cartoons for the school newspaper. My degree is in English Literature with a minor in Writing. I took every creative writing class that was available to me. My senior thesis was on the irony of the monniker “graphic novel” and comics as literature. In my final year I also took an independent study on visual storytelling and writing for comics which was a great experience. Most of my non-comics related academic work has been on Narrative Theory and Narratology. My graduate work has been in Narrative in Modernism, with a focus on post-WWI British Literature, but I’ve taken a hiatus from my studies to see where this whole webcomics thing takes me.
DR: I know there are plenty of readers of the comic in the UK theatre tech world – and I know quite a few fans. How widely have you found these observations about theatre and performance tech are recognised and enjoyed?
SY: When I started the comic in March I had no idea that it would appeal to any sort of broader audience than the few techs, stage managers, and designers I knew. I thought that these were probably just a collection of in-jokes that no one else would think is funny. And I was wrong. It’s been shared internationally, everywhere you can imagine. I’ve sent t-shirts and prints to the UK, Canada, Australia, and to just about every state in the US. I was shocked when I started hearing from fans in non-English speaking countries, too: Greece, Switzerland, Singapore. It seems these backstage struggles transcend language. There’s not a lot of recognition out there for the people that work backstage, and I like that my comics help to let those people know that what they do is appreciated, and they are not alone.
I think that people are really connecting with the characters, as well. I hear on a daily basis things like “Morty is my spirit animal,” and “people tell me that I’m just like Wuggles.”
One benefit to doing a comic with such a narrow focus is that the audience is fairly well connected to one another. It was pretty cool the way that it came back around to me. Wuggles’ real life analogue was doing an LED demonstration at the theatre for a group of college students and one of them whispered to another that he looked just like the lighting guy from Q2Q, to which he replied that he was and they nearly fell out of the booth.
DR: If these backstage struggles are familiar all over the world, what would you love to see happening to get communication between onstage and backstage happening?
SY: Any successful production has to have a mutuality of respect between the actors and the crew. Many of the jokes in Q2Q are at the expense of actors and I take a lot of flack for that. I’m told on a weekly basis that Morty should be fired for being so disrespectful to the actors, and that Steve needs to learn how to take a note from the director without being a jerk about it. I’ve been told that I’m “reenforcing the worst possible stereotypes of the industry” and all sorts of other things. I think that some readers take it too seriously. I’m not writing a primer on interpersonal relationships of the theatre. In fact most of the comics say more about how you shouldn’t behave than how you should. It’s more a cathartic collection of things that people may want to say but shouldn’t or can’t in the moment, and so I let Steve or Morty or Wuggles say them.
Because human beings are involved, there will always be difficulty in communicating between onstage and offstage personnel. The objectives of each job is different. It’s tough even working with different members of the creative team.
I appreciate any theatre education program that requires its students work both on and off stage. I think that’s great for the development of any person that wants to work in theatre. You don’t have to be good at it, but it helps to know what it’s like. The actors that I work with who are also techs are my favorite to work with because they respect the process better. I’ve been an actor and I respect the work of actors, but that respect is not always mutual. And I’ve definitely slipped into some of the worse habits I’ve depicted in Q2Q in my theatrical life, but I think everyone has had those moments. I’ve argued with directors because we aren’t speaking in the same language, I’ve had to take laps because I’ve been so infuriated with a production that I can’t be in the space for a while. Those are my worst moments. And I think everyone who works in theatre, actors and techs alike, has had those moments. Most people just don’t make comics about them and put them on the Internet for public consumption.
DR: It feels like the fact that actors are ‘heard’ but not seen in the strip is something of a redress to a theatre community – and a world – that’s obsessed with actors.
SY: Actors get their applause on the stage. The techs don’t get the same kind of recognition (no matter how many actors on stage point to the booth during curtain call in some attempt to share it). Q2Q is my way of high-fiving everyone backstage at every performance and letting them know that their work matters and is appreciated. That’s part of why I named the comic after the most excruciating part of a production.
DR: What’s going on at Maryland Ensemble – what’s the company, where do you work and how does it relate to the world and characters of Q2Q?
SY: The MET, as we call it, is a small black box theatre space with two stages in Frederick, MD, about 50 minutes from both DC and Baltimore. There are about 30 members of the company, including stage managers, designers, directors, costumers, techs, actors, etc., with many doing several different jobs in a season. We do six main stage shows and five kids shows each season, as well as hosting improv comedy, music, and a weekly podcast comedy talkshow. The MET also offers arts education and community outreach programs. I personally work two days a week teaching improv at two different Boys and Girls Club sites through the MET. I work principally as a sound designer and board op.
The MET has been my theatre home since 2010, and it has certainly shaped the way that I think about theatre. A number of the characters are based, either in personality or physicality, on people I’ve worked with. Wuggles is based on a real person, Morty is a combination of several stage managers I’ve worked with, and Steve is (if it wasn’t transparent) mostly myself. The situations in the comic are embellished, of course, but most are rooted in experience. They’re a combination of actual events, things I’d wish I’d said or done, and some examples of what not to do in the theatre.
DR: The early ‘Anatomy’ strips are just brilliant. Q2Q is focused on the traditional ‘straight play’ team makeup – director, costume, actors, stage managers – are there other kinds of teams and interactions at MET that could find their way into the strip?
SY: I am asked constantly to include a scenic designer or painter or rigger or A/V designer (and some people ask for actors, but I don’t think they quite understand). I’d love to include a scenic designer and a prop master. I’ve thought about other occupations, too, like musical director, house/box office manager, etc. but I’m not quite to the point where I feel like I need to add in more voices. I’m having enough trouble including all the characters that I do have in the strips. We definitely see the least of Cass and Sharon (the strip’s technical director and costume designer). Sharon gets the short end mostly because I have the least experience with costumes and I don’t want to do a disservice to the profession. I get great suggestions from fans on situations to include her in though. She also serves as the voice of non-theatre people in the strip. Cass doesn’t show up as often as I’d like, but that’s mostly because I’ve only recently solidified her character design. So, we’ll probably see more of her as the strip rolls on.
DR: Referring specifically to Q2Q #4 - how should/could mainstream and online reviewing deal with sound/lighting design better? Is no news really good news?
SY: This is a great question. I know a lot of people, designers especially, that want to be recognized for all of the work that they have put into a production, and they feel like being left out of a review is an insult to the work they’ve done. I don’t agree with that mindset, and here’s why: my job is not always perceivable and should almost never be the focus of a scene. It is the acting is important and, as a designer, it is my job to highlight and compliment the onstage performance. Most of the technical aspects of theatre should be invisible to the audience. I have to have done my job very poorly for the audience to be taken out of the performance enough to even think about the sound design.
DR: I can concede that technical aspects are rarely as prominently considered as the human presence onstage, but I don’t think I understand invisibility as a goal – in that case any mention/notice of sound design would be a failing, wouldn’t it? Is it cohesion and seamlessness that you strive toward? Or is it about mediating the effects you create with the onstage performance? Obviously your work comes in consultation with the director, but if you were your idealised Sound Designer with a free reign, would underscoring be everything you’d hope for?
SY: Cohesion, integration, yes. I tend to get chosen to work on the productions that require the creation of a soundscape, or the immersion in a created world. There is more to it than underscoring, and my work is often not musical. I like to be experimental. I like working with foley and live sound effects. If it doesn’t add to the performance, then don’t do it. You can’t design with your ego.
When I say invisible, I mean that it shouldn’t stick out. It shouldn’t detract from the performance, and it also shouldn’t supersede the performance when that is not necessary. I think it is acceptable to leave an audience wondering how some technical aspect was done, but nothing should be done in a way that detracts from the on-stage content.
To have been mentioned in a review for something other than a glaring mistake is a high compliment. I don’t need to be mentioned in a review to feel good about the work that I do. I don’t do what I do for that recognition. However, I do want my work to be critiqued. Sound design is both an art and a skill (whether the Tony committee thinks so, or not) and it can be improved through criticism. There are those out there that like to claim that reviewers just don’t understand lights and sound, but that is silly. They may not understand all of the in depth technical aspects, sure, but I’m certain that a reviewer just like any member of the audience can tell when lights and sound are and are not working for them as part of the performance.
To not be mentioned in a review does not mean that you have done a good or bad job. It does probably mean that you didn’t do such a horrible job that it had to be mentioned, but it also probably means that you didn’t knock their socks off with your design. I don’t design with the reviewer in mind. I do the work necessary to make the production as strong as possible.
Side note: of all the shows I have designed, I have been mentioned by name in one review, for sound design in The Importance of Being Earnest.
DR: The Olivier Awards over here have a Best Sound Design Category (as well as Lighting and Set) – so come on over! To be fair, our other awards (like the Evening Standard Awards) are more likely to give a single Design award.
SY: It’s really disheartening, especially for young professionals, to see that even the industry’s own awards don’t recognize the achievements of the technical side. That the creative team gets lumped into one Design category is ridiculous. It’s unfair to evaluate costume design against lighting in the way that it would be unfair to put acting against directing.
My undergrad had technical awards to go with the acting awards. We often had contractors in to be on the creative team and TD, but the run crew, operators, stage managers, and carpenters for every show were all students and we recognized them for their work. I cherish the award I won my senior year for sound designing Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. We also had an award each year for the student that we felt worked the hardest without recognition. It could have been that they auditioned but weren’t cast and still volunteered to work on the show in another capacity, or they stepped in at the last minute, but whatever the case, they acted out of dedication to the production or the program, not for credit or recognition. I think my college theatre did it right and does it better than a lot of these loftier awards.
I’m thinking of creating a new set of awards for technical achievement. I can call them the “Morty’s”. What do you think?
Steven will be making an appearance at the USITT conference in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 20th 2015. He’ll be signing prints and doing sketches. If you’re around, say hello! Q2Q updates Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Exeunt asked me what play had stayed with me this year. I talked about a film instead:
It wasn’t a play, but it contained theatre. It wasn’t an opera, but it sang and growled and we watched it in an opera house. It was a film – a Paul Giamatti and Maggie Gyllenhaal film, even – but it also extends beyond the film presented at a specially-prepared ENO, as part of the work is also a series of sculptures featured in, changing during and created through the creation of said film. We didn’t see them at the ENO. Did we miss the whole work?
With RIVER OF FUNDAMENT Barney took Norman Mailer’s difficult and derided workAncient Evenings and made it more difficult and (at least according to Richard Dorment of the Telegraph) more derided. Packed full of incredible music from Jonathan Bepler, rawhide percussion from Milford Graves, reincarnation, Pharaohs, docks, marching bands, turds encased in gold leaf, all-american muscle cars, molten metal and with appearances from Dick Cavett, Salman Rushdie and porn performer Bobbi Starr, its six-hour mass was nevertheless unerringly focussed, driven, and powerful, even when it was frustrating, elusive and objectionable.
It seems absurd to draw such a comparison, but approaching RIVER OF FUNDAMENT felt like reading Ulysses - you appreciated it while wishing it would be more accommodating to you in your oblivion. They are also both completely filthy.
Cartoon and text for Exeunt.
John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ latest opera is a wonderfully eccentric piece of bible fan-fiction, bringing together disparate female voices of testimony and poetry – Rasio Castellanos, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, June Jordan and Hildegard von Bingen – alongside the male writers of the Old and New Testament as well as Rubén Darío and Primo Levi. The resulting libretto compellingly collapses the wracked and raised bodies of Lazarus and Jesus – one typologically figuring the other in each act – from the perspective of a more obscure ‘Mary’, simultaneously the sister of Martha of Bethany, the female disciple who perfumes Jesus’ feet, and Mary Magdalen. The opera foregrounds accounts of the suffering of the people alongside the suffering of Jesus – we open in an internment camp of some kind where Mary is contained alongside drug users and the dispossessed, and though we move to Martha’s House of Hospitality for unemployed women, we never leave the physical restriction of the barbed wire fences of the opening. Other staging, on movable blocks made to look like cardboard boxes, is temporary compared to these ever-present authoritarian structures.
The libretto never quite makes good on its promising opening as the more well-known aspects of the biblical narratives take hold – references to Dorothy Day’s 1973 farm protests with César Chávez disappointingly feel like distractions from the crucifixion. Partly this is because Sellars resorts again and again to directly using John’s Gospel to ‘narrate’, drawing us back to the familiar, rather than the stand-out poetry of the opera which comes from Louise Erdrich in Act II, summoning up a powerful Christ “who chops down his own cross / who straddles it / who stares like a cat / whose cheeks are the gouged blue of science” and delightfully evokes the resurrection: “The tiny frogs pull their strange new bodies out of suckholes.”
This is great material for Adams’ powerful full-bodied music in a way that even that most purple of the gospel-writers, John can’t compare to. By comparison, passages like “then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already. Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem about fifteen furlongs off” repeatedly drain the energy from the scenes they establish.
Perhaps because the work is seen from the perspective of our ‘Other Mary’, seeing in Lazarus and Jesus the same physical struggles and miraculous rebirth, the opera plays out as a very male, corpus christi rendering of the Passion. Giant anatomical drawings of the male torso and outstretched limbs are flown in and out at the back throughout – hands held Michelangelo-wise towards the gods.
The stand-out performance of the evening, from the Flex dancer known as Banks (real name James Davis) absolutely embodies that male physicality. His role the programme is ‘Angel Gabriel’, but like Stephanie Berge who dances alongside and around mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon’s Mary Magdalene like a Philip Pullman daemon, Bank’s Gabriel dances Jesus’ strength and pain. His movements – variously popping and locking, slow-motion, moonwalking, martial arts and Ray Harryhausen stuttering – take us through the crucifixion and the long night through to the earthquake of Jesus’ death with more precision than anything else onstage. He can’t help but be the focus, a vibrant cloth in what is – with its considerable ambition and numerous voices – a patchwork opera.
Until 5th December 2014.
For Exeunt.
Dumbshow’s beautiful staging of The Pearl, John Steinbeck’s version of the Mexican folk tale is presented as one of many stories that washes up on English beaches, alongside the other spoils that the beachcombing cast have collected: boxes, lamps, bottles with messages, rope, toys and – specifically – right-footed wellington boots. (The left boots end up in Norway, if you were wondering.)
Sam Gayton’s adaptation moves seamlessly in and out of prose and rhymed verse, English idiom and fragments of Steinbeck’s original text. Alongside a production which is peppered with original sound and music alongside cues from Merill and Styne (“Don’t Rain on My Parade” and Disney (“Under the Sea”), it feels as if not only the props, but the entire play has supposedly washed ashore – a hodge-podge of presentational storytelling techniques. The ‘diving’ section where protagonist Kino first finds the pearl is one of the most resourceful, fun and compelling uses of the beg-steal-and-borrow (or make-do-and-mend?) storytelling aesthetic that I have come across.
The adaptation is slightly held back by the structure of Steinbeck’s novella. He expanded from his 1945 short story around the same time as he co-adapted the screenplay for the Mexican film, which was released in 1947. The final act of the story is correspondingly filmic taking Kino, his common-law wife Juana, and their baby on a dangerous journey across the cliffs and into the caves high above the sea, chased by shadowy hunters, toward a brutal climax.
It’s deeply affecting, but it simultaneously takes the narrative pressure off the structural causes of Kino and the other pearl-divers’ subsistence – at the hands of colluding pearl-buyers, a conservative church and the mercenary evils of the local doctor – which are all so drily and compellingly related in the novella, and mockingly and grotesquely rendered in Dumbshow’s production.
For all this, the defiantly anti-capitalist presentation of a story about value, currency, beauty and greed does the work that the story somewhat gives up on – while the gritty shiny thing clasped in Kino’s grubby hands may be the ‘pearl of the world’ to any of the characters in the tale, to the storytellers and to the audience it is only a smooth pebble, like any on the beach, and all values, judgments and hopes heaped upon its surface are equally laughable and tragic.
Until 20th November 2014.
For Exeunt.
Amy and Glenda are both thieves. Amy does houses for this guy she slept with once. Glenda stole shelves and shelves of books – before the council managed to shut the local library. Amy needs a place to stay. Glenda needs someone who can manage the stairs.
It’s a strange trick that Soho Theatre pulls off to feel quite so akin to a festival venue. That mix of comedy, cabaret and theatre – and the studio feel to each of its spaces - make it a difficult venue to be taken over by any individual production. This could be a disaster for some shows, but I find that the feeling of transitory performance, the knowledge that in an hour’s time the stage could be someone else’s, a different argument for a different audience, means that it’s a dream venue for a fringe transfer. The last play I saw in Soho Upstairs was another monologue play for a female performer (and another I saw late) – Charlotte Josephine’s Bitch Boxer, performed by Holly Augustine. What both plays share, apart from martial arts seen through a female lens (Spine’s Amy is proud of the bit of ‘Wing Chun’ she has picked up – “it’s perfect for little people”), is the sheer energy required to perform them, and though Spine is less of a physical workout than Bitch Boxer, Rosie Wyatt starts and continues at an incredible volume and intensity throughout. These plays are demanding. They are also both about the loss of people of profound influence. Whereas the loss of Chloe’s father in Bitch Boxer is intensely personal and affecting in its specificity, the loss of Amy’s elderly friend Glenda in Spine is akin to an origin story for a type of person many of us have met – that brand of fiercely outspoken left-wing activist who expresses herself through work.
Watching these two productions, and what feels like a healthy quotient of other monologue plays this year – especially Kath Burlinson’s Emily - The Making of a Militant Suffragette, Vinay Patel’s True Brits and Helen Duff’s weird and wonderful Vanity Bites Back (more solo show than monologue play but bloody fantastic and supportive of this point) has had me thinking about the basic make-up of a monologue onstage. Its theatrical grammar is dramatized loneliness – the single figure onstage in opposition to its (normally) more numerate audience. Acting within this grammar can have strange effects – one of my problems with Matthew Hurt’s The Man Jesus was trying to resolve the grammar of its twelve voices in one body, the effect of which was never convincingly corralled by the play.
What usually happens is that the loneliness of the monologue makes it as inward looking as the novel – primarily about something that happens inside of, rather than between people. With Spine and Bitch Boxer though the loneliness is emblematic of grief, and yet that loneliness is overcome by the invoking, the resurrection of the lost through the single performance – so Chloe’s father is vivid to us, and Glenda is oh so potently resurrected, and the influence on Amy’s life stamped into her impression of her lost friend. Spine is a ghost story, as many reviewers have said, but the play would be terrifying, hopeless, without the influence of Glenda beyond the grave.
I missed Spine at the Fringe, and though I did fully intend to catch it, I admit that a certain part of me internally rebelled against the force of praise for it in person and online – because I found that description of the Fringe First-winning monologue play sounded… familiar. Not that I can pinpoint a play with a really similar arc or even another story that does quite the same thing. But the tale of the redemption of an undereducated teenage girl – groomed for burglary on one hand, beating up her best friends on the other and shamefacedly referring to her own family as ‘pikeys’ – a redemption by trust, books and caring for an elderly woman, sounds familiarly didactic.
I felt I could predict the shape of it – a comfortable arc that would prop up rather than challenge my feelings about those forces – trust, learning, imagination and responsibility – as redemptive.
The language of propping-up runs through Spine – the spine is both ‘backbone’ – which Glenda singles out as Amy’s defining characteristic that she can take into a political world – “you’ve got backbone”, and the physical spines of the library books that Glenda has filled her house with. Amy talks about putting up breeze block shelves ‘to stop the spines being damaged’ and the image of providing relief – to give someone room to be strong, to support, radiates out through the text. There’s a short reference to another caring relationship towards the start of the play: “Mum gets depressed and cries a lot. She says she’s got too much water in her. She cared for my nan before she passed, and I’d say things ain’t really been the same since then”. Glenda and Amy are breeze blocks to one another, but when Glenda passes away Amy holds her inside her – a physical spine, running through her character, and the performance.
When I came to see the production at Soho, the depth in Clara Brennan’s writing and the pitch of Rosie Wyatt’s performance not only propped up but made me believe those redemptive clichés all over again, which seems all the more powerful if you have sat down at the top of the show with cynical outlook. You’re changed by the thing you thought you’d be resistant to, and it knocks you for six. And perhaps (with half a brain still kicking over Chris Thorpe’s singular Confirmation) the support and reaffirmation of belief – central beliefs about the extreme capacity for redemption, and the possibility of real change – through emotional response, is more than a conservative exercise, more than preaching to the converted, but a necessary joy – a positive confirmation.
Until 2nd November 2014.
For Exeunt.