Bloody London:
A Report from the UK
By Caridad Svich
As the London theatre season makes West End room
for the bright new musical Billy Elliott and a starry revival
of Guys and Dolls with Ewan McGregor and Jane Krakowski, other
spaces in the city are presenting works filled with menace and blood.
At the Royal Court two new plays are being showcased to fine advantage:
David Eldridge's Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness and
Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Woman Before in a translation
by David Tushingham. Schimmelpfennig is a major contemporary German
dramatist whose work includes the acclaimed Arabian Night and
Push Up. While his plays are less known here in the U.S., it
shouldn't be long before they find homes at diverse American venues.
His writing--adroitly and cunningly translated by Tushingham--is witty,
stark, and mysterious.
The Woman Before, staged in the Court's
downstairs space by director Richard Wilson, is a story of love gone
wrong. A seemingly happily married man receives a knock on the door
by a former girlfriend he hasn't seen in 24 years. Bewildered by her
appearance, the man (played by Nigel Lindsay) tries to make nice with
this demanding and forlorn stranger from his past (played by Helen Baxendale),
but in short scenes that go back and forth in time during a single evening,
it becomes clear that this stranger cannot be easily dissuaded from
her quest to reclaim lost love. Vengeance of a very Greek kind is on
her mind, and the play begins to spin around the escalating manipulations
of a person triumphantly ruined by her obsessive love.
Schimmelpfennig plays out the alternately tragic
and absurdly comic story, which ends with scenes of bodies being violated
and burned, in shard-like scenes of increasing intensity. The play is
structured around the clock-like machinations and disparate perspectives
of a night of violence. What starts innocently ends tragically. Yet
what distinguishes this modern Medea-influenced tale is the
macabre precision Schimmelpfennig brings to examining every moment of
the fateful night. His refusal to settle his characters or his audience
in a zone of comfort is strangely upsetting and fitfully frustrating.
Schimmelpfennig's goal is to unsettle and provoke, and he is abetted
by a suitably restrained, disciplined cast, which also includes Saskia
Reeves as the man's wife, Robert Pattinson as their son and Georgia
Taylor as the son's girlfriend.
For all this, at barely 80 minutes The Woman
Before is a bit slender and lacks the transcendence of Schimmelpfennig's
Arabian Night (produced by ATC/UK in 2002). It nevertheless
confirms his unique theatrical vision.
Violence also figures prominently in productions
playing at the Royal National Theatre and the Almeida. In the RNT's
Lyttelton Theatre can be found Improbable Theatre's inspired adaptation
of the 1973 cult horror film Theatre of Blood. At the Almeida,
director Rufus Norris stages Federico Garcia Lorca's starkly tragic
Blood Wedding in a colloquial and lean new English translation
by Tanya Ronder. Both productions feature stars--the supremely gifted
stage and screen actor Jim Broadbent as Edward Lionheart in Theatre
of Blood (the role originally played by Vincent Price in the film)
and Latino movie idol Gael Garcia Bernal as Leonardo in Blood Wedding--yet
neither relies solely on them to carry the show.
Improbable Theatre has been making magical and
inventive pieces since 1986. Led by Phelim McDermott, Julian Crouch
and Lee Simpson, it has delighted audiences with 70 Hill Lane, Lifegame,
and The Hanging Man, and later this year it will bring the
show Spirit to New York Theatre Workshop. McDermott and Crouch
are also responsible, along with Cultural Industry, for the gloriously
macabre junk opera Shockheaded Peter. Working with small- and
large-scale material, Improbable has proved over time that its name
is extremely apt, a token of the leaders' insatiable curiosity about
the theater. Theatre of Blood fits the tradition perfectly.
Drafting a full script in advance for the first
time (rather than assembling it after improvisation), McDermott and
Simpson have fashioned a faithful version of the campy film while also
creating something new. Re-setting the story in a dis-used, derelict
theatre (brilliantly designed by Rae Smith), Improbable opens with the
image of Lionheart poised upon a ladder in the midst of a grand theatrical
gesture, surrounded by ghostly figures from different eras of theatre
history. This prelude is broken by sound and light, suddenly the figures
vanish, and all that is left is the theatre space itself and the entrance
of an unassuming yet pretentious man dandily dressed in 1970s flare
trousers, black turtleneck and sporty tweed jacket. He is, we soon discover,
a theatre critic.
So the naughtily brilliant, rough-around-the-edges
mayhem begins. For those unfamiliar with the film, the story is blunderingly
simple and deliciously obvious: a Shakespearean actor of dubious talent
is not given the Critics Award at end of the season and kills himself,
or so it seems. What transpires instead is that he takes up with a band
of the undead and vows to seek revenge on every critic who has given
him a bad notice. The revenge takes the form of murders modeled after
famous scenes of dismemberment, gouging and stabbing from Shakespeare's
tragedies and histories. The story follows the murders (each more extreme
than the next), until no critic is left standing and everyone is bathed
in blood.
By casting Broadbent, one of the UK's most beloved
comic actors, McDermott ensures the audience's immediate engagement.
Unlike Vincent Price, who exuded a peculiar, somewhat effete menace,
Broadbent is all size, madness, and heart. What is terrifying about
him, despite the camp, is the melancholy vulnerability that underlies
his uncontrollable, obsessive streak of serial killings. He is an actor
wronged, and a human being destroyed by a desire for positive acknowledgment
from the very critics he purports to despise. Broadbent embraces the
paradox of the role with aplomb and finesse. His fellow players, which
include the esteemed Hayley Carmichael, Bloolips Queer Theatre co-founder
Bette Bourne, classical actor Sally Dexter and the young Rachel Stirling
(who plays the role originated by her mother Diana Rigg in the film),
all deliver impeccably grand performances as well.
Part of this production's charm has to do with
the puerile adolescent's intoxicating relish at shocking an audience
and indulging in sheer gore. With all of Improbable's pieces (and this
is true of Shockheaded Peter too) the joy of what it took to
make the work in the first place is always present. You can sense from
McDermott's zealous and overextended approach to the story of Theatre
of Blood the strangely guilty pleasure he must have had watching
the cult film when he was a child. That the piece is at the National
(as a co-production with Improbable) makes it all the more irresistible.
After all, this is where GREAT plays have been staged season after season,
not rude, prankish, super-bloody, B-horror-flick adaptations! The incongruity
of the venue is sublime, especially in light of the piece's innumerable
theatrical references. It's as if Lincoln Center had produced, with
full resources and ingenuity, a production of Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane.
At the Almeida, Rufus Norris has followed up
his Festen (a critical triumph that will likely come to Broadway
this fall) with a death-ballad staging of Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding.
Reducing the cast to thirteen, Norris strips the play down to a few
elements: a curtain, a wooden chair, and a harness. The movement is
sparse and the pace feverish. His multi-ethnic cast (from Iceland, Mexico,
Ireland, England, Netherlands, Portugal, the Caribbean and India) spit
their lines in bursts: thoughts half-rendered, spoken aloud. It is always
night, and the color of the sky is vaginal red. Orlando Gough's music
draws from klezmer, Celtic folk songs, samba, and cabaret. There is
no interval and the show clocks in at 90-odd minutes.
Although Garcia Bernal is the box-office draw,
he is not the production's center. The focus is directorial, Norris's
wrestling match with this extraordinarily difficult, beautiful beast
of a play. While the lightning-speed approach is provocative--and certainly
Lorca invites Death to rule the dramatic world--I felt that Norris could
have trusted the play a bit more, let its tender and joyful side blossom
as much as its fiercely haunted fatalism. Even the wedding scene is
tinged with incessant despair, and the result is a one-sided reading.
In his attempt to wrest the piece from folkloric stereotypes that often
mar productions of Garcia Lorca's work, Norris has gone too far in viewing
the play as Thanatos's triumph over Eros from the get-go. Nevertheless,
the production demonstrates Norris's ambition and intelligence as a
director willing to go for broke with his vision.
As for the performers, particular standouts
are Bjorn Haraldsson as the Groom and Rosaleen Linehan as the Mother.
Bernal is hard-working, if lacking a bit in power as the betraying lover,
but it's nice to see a star of his international status taking a pay
cut to work on a classic in a small venue far from his native city.
Displacement and dissent mark two international
pieces--KUBA and The Story of Ronald, the Clown from McDonald's--that
live between the worlds of theatre and performance art. The enterprising
company Artangel, spearheaded by Michael Morris, is presenting KUBA
by Turkish artist Kutlag Ataman in an abandoned sorting office just
off of Bloomsbury. The area known as Kuba emerged in Istanbul in the
late 1960s as a neighborhood of safe houses. Today it is comprised of
a few hundred dwellings that are home to non-conformists of various
religions and ethnicities. Accessed by several flights of stairs in
the graffitti-marked sorting office, the entrance to this multiple DVD
installation is a creaky institutional door that opens onto a vast room
where about twenty TV sets (different makes and models -- all old) play
edited testimonials of Kuba residents. Mostly shot in medium and close-up,
these videos tell stories of abuse, defiance and despair. Violence weaves
the stories together -- the violence of parents on children, gang members
on passersby, brother on brother. While presented as an art installation,
KUBA functions as virtual theater of testimony due to its complex
storytelling and emphasis on the real. It's a remarkable installation
that raises important questions about the protection of dissidents and
the recording and witnessing of their stories.
Argentine-born, Madrid-based writer-director
Rodrigo Garcia has similar storytelling matters in mind in The Story
of Ronald, the Clown from McDonald's. Garcia brought his aptly
named La Carniceria Teatro (Slaughter Theatre) to the Brighton Festival
in May for the UK premiere of this imagistic, highly physical, assaultive
meditation on consumer culture and globalization. Performed by three
actors, The Story of Ronald brings to mind the early work of
avant-gardists such as Squat Theatre and Pina Bausch.
The piece begins with a lanky young man standing
next to a podium displaying a Big Mac, fries and a large Coke. He tells
us (in Spanish -- English subtitles appear in the background) that his
father was quite ill when he was as child. When he was taken to the
hospital to visit him, the reward awaiting him at the end was a trip
to McDonald's. The actor then calmly strips down to his underwear and
is bathed in milk by another performer. The milk-bathing becomes more
and more savage as the young man flails about like an animal in the
sloshing white mess, barely able to breathe and yet craving more and
more milk. As the evening progresses, other stories are told in similar
direct address by each of the three actors, all broken up by movement
sections where ketchup, whipped cream, baked beans, hamburgers, slabs
of meat and soft drinks are significantly featured as their partners
in dance. Despite these brief descriptions that stress the punk excess
of Garcia's staging, this piece is exhilarating--utterly captivating
in its grossness and challenging physical presence. Reveling in the
body, in the smells of the foods we eat and discard, in the mixture
of nausea and delight with which we experience our roles as citizens
of the Americas indebted to a multi-national few who try to govern and
in fact dictate our taste, The Story of Ronald is an elegy
for a time when the likes of Simon Cowell and Posh & Becks did not compete
for attention in the same psychic space as Borges, Cervantes and Oscar
Wilde.
During my London sojourn, many practitioners
complained to me of the increasingly conservative climate in UK theatre
right now, and of the syndrome of unnecessary, starry revivals, as ubiquitous
across the pond as it is on Broadway. Nevertheless, the evidence is
clear that innovative new work and writing continue to be valued, if
not always enthusiastically embraced, by British audiences and critics.
What The Woman Before, Theatre of Blood, Blood Wedding, KUBA
and The Story of Ronald have in common, beyond the shared thematic
concern of violence and its effects, is a fundamental belief that art
matters.