Theatre Review 2019

This was a much harder list to put together than last year. Maybe because last year, with a two-year-old, I didn’t see all that much, so the selection process was easier. This year,. with a three-year-old, I’ve seen a bit more, though still far less than I used to. But also it felt like there was much less clear patterning and grouping than before. It’s not been an exceptional year for new plays, I’d say, but British directing seems to be better than ever. I’ve seen more great theatre designs on British stages in the last five years than in the previous twenty. I’m aware that I’ve also taken fewer risks, seen a smaller proportion of stuff in the alternative sector and I want to change that next year. I saw plenty of good stuff that, for various reasons, didn’t make this list. I loved A Very Expensive Poison and Lungs at the Old Vic; I was cheered by the return of Ed Thomas at the Royal Court; I was delighted and moved by Small Island in the Olivier, laughed immoderately at Tartuffe in the Lyttelton, and was drawn in by Anna in the Dorfman. I was utterly beguiled by The Boyfriend at the Menier Chocolate Factory, but very disappointed by Waitress in the West End, which seemed thin and conservative, while pretending to be rich and radical. There were a few things that somehow didn’t work for me by people I hugely admire: I found When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other a frustratingly cold and abstract piece - I liked the text and I liked the production, but together I struggled to find a way in. I really loved Alice Birch’s [Blank] on the page, but I struggled with it at the Donmar; for me, the decision to make the long middle-class scene a kind of centrepiece unbalanced things and made the piece seem much more of a direct comment piece than I think it is. There were many things I wish I’d seen, principal among them Selina Thompson’s Salt. I could easily have put Forced Entertainment’s Out of Order in the top ten and in fact, oh god, maybe I should. Hell, another time. But here are ten things I loved this year.

10.      24 Hours of Peace (Royal Exchange)

This is an oddity, perhaps, because I didn’t see this in the theatre. It was a 24-hour live broadcast (on Resonance.fm) of a show from the Royal Exchange. The show was a tapestry of voices about war and peace, stitched together by the great Neil Bartlett from interviews with dozens of people with ordinary and extraordinary experiences of war and peace and performed by a dazzling cast. I didn’t hear it all, of course (I slept for some of the time) but I probably heard about half of it and every time I dipped in, there would be some new thread, new weave, the pattern emerging more strongly, the material getting stronger and heavier. The live radio format allowed us to place ourselves in the space and time of the theatre, so it’s absolutely on this list.

9.         Europe (Donmar)

 As always, it seems, David Greig has had a blisteringly busy year, with his brilliant versions of Local Hero, Touching the Void and Solaris. It might seem perverse to pick probably the show he had least to do with, the revival at the Donmar of his 1994 play, Europe, but it was a stunning rediscovery. In 1994, the play seemed like a fearful warning about them over there; now, just as we cut our ties with one part of the European project, Europe seemed absolutely about us. Michael Longhurst’s debut production as AD of the Donmar was a thrill, a faultless cast, and an open briskly confident production with a spectacular ending just as the play turns brutally on its audience and gives us a glimpse of how fascism can come here.

8.         While the Sun Shines (Orange Tree)

 This has been a year of tremendous revivals (maybe more than a play of tremendous new plays?) You may know that I’m a fan of Rattigan’s work, but I’d never seen this play and, while I’d enjoyed reading it, had always wondered whether it could escape the wartime that was its setting, subject and original time of production. It did better than that; the play emerged, in Paul Miller’s perfect production, as somehow completely contemporary, breathtakingly funny, and sexually subversive. A farce about love, desire, class, sexuality, authority, men and women, women and men, and, at one point, men and men and men.

7.         Three Sisters (National Theatre: Olivier)

 So this is the most recent show to make my MUCH-ANTICIPATED top ten (yes it is, shut up). I saw it two days ago and it really blew me away. The transposition from Russia in the 1890s to Biafra during the late-sixties civil war is completely successful. While Chekhov’s play exists between wars and during a period of – we say with hindsight – revolutionary change, this production makes all of those changes urgent and striking. The fire in the town that evokes the stirrings of altruism and the ultimate selfishness of Chekhov’s sisters becomes, in Inua Ellams hands, the bombing of a market and the horror is sharply renewed. The presence of the army is an image of listless boredom for Chekhov but is transformed by Ellams into a self-destructive image of thwarted self-realization. But though the transposition is very strong, it is also very much Chekhov’s play. I can’t know for sure that the audience I saw it with was new to the theatre but they certainly seemed new to the play, because it was thrilling to hear an audience gasp at the turns in the story – while it’s true that Chekhov’s genius is partly about making inaction, passivity and boredom theatrical, that audience reminded me how vivid and strong the story is, the shifts in relationships, the casual cruelties, the dashed hopes never being a rich as in this version. Most Chekhovian was the ensemble cast of around twenty – have I ever seen that big an all-black cast at the National before? – and there wasn’t a weak link. The three sisters themselves (Natalie Simpson, Sarah Niles, Racheal Ofori) are all breathtaking, and challenged by Ronke Adekoluejo’s fiercely waspish Abosede (Chekhov’s Natasha). Nadia Fall’s production is tight, engaging, very funny and often desperately sad. The moment where Sule Rimi’s Onyinyechukwu accepted his wife’s misery at the departure of her lover, Ikemba (played with melancholy seductiveness by Ken Nwosu) is one of the most heartbreaking in Chekhov’s work and this moment was as fine as I’ve seen it done. 

6.         Equus (English Touring Theatre: Theatre Royal Stratford East)

Still with the revivals. I have never much liked Equus; I’ve always thought it a rather pompous, monolithic play about rather abstract things like the death of divinity in western civilization. But in Ned Bennett’s revelatory version – the text usefully winnowed, the stage stripped almost bare, the horses evoked by Shelley Maxwell’s extraordinarily powerful, sexy choreography – I saw the play with new eyes. Now it seemed so clearly a radically queer play in which the search for the divine is a search for sexual transcendence of heteronormative capitalism. The bare stage made everything appear and transform in front of us suggesting a radical plasticity to contemporary life, that we really can change what we see.

5.         Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp (Royal Court)

 I suspected this show would be in my top ten when it was announced, months before I saw it. It is further proof that Caryl Churchill has not stopped moving. This quadtych was linked by a dialogue between the contemporary and the mythic (and as such seemed to connect with Equus this year). The endlessly cycled classical brutalities of Kill were expressed with twenty-first-century weariness, while the girl made of Glass seemed both an object of fear and hope in which (through which?) we could see our own era’s concerns. Bluebeard’s Friends, with its rationalisations and anguishes about loyalty and responsibility, seemed to me an oblique reflection on the exposure of Churchill’s great collaborator Max Stafford-Clark and his sexual predations. Imp meanwhile was a superb theatrical puzzle that dared us to believe just as the characters do (and don’t) in the presence of magic, just as the pure performances of the jugglers and acrobats between the shows made us wonder what it means for people to really do things on stage right there before our very eyes.

4.         Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (Attenborough Centre)

 And if Churchill was asking us to reflect on theatre, Tim Crouch’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation was an immersion in those questions. We took our seats in a circle of chairs on each of which, as at some prayer meeting, was a cloth-bound book that contained all the words that would be spoken at our meeting. And the story told was transsubstantiated between page and performance (like, well, quite a lot of theatre), with things we read but didn’t see, things we saw but didn’t imagine, things we imagined but didn’t see or read. It told the story of a family who started a millenarian cult following the death of a child (Tim Crouch’s plays are haunted by the sufferings of children) and the attempt of one member to save the family from some awful fate. It was also a reflection on acting (we spoke quite a bit of the dialogue) and on authorship (rather brilliantly, Crouch’s appearance is very delayed, such that when he appeared, even though I know Tim quite well, his presence sent a chill through me). I kind of knew the idea beforehand and the playfulness with theatre, representation, word and image was as brilliant and searching and thoughtful as I’d guessed; what I was not prepared for was the desperate sadness of the whole thing. It was ultimately a show not about theatre but about terrible unassuageable grief.

3.         Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (Royal Court Upstairs)

Jasmine Lee-Jones’s play seemed to me completely transformative; it’s the first play I’ve ever seen that really found a theatrical form to make social media work on stage. Building perhaps on (IMHO) brave failures like Teh Internet Is Serious Business it manages to capture the lightness and deep darkness of Twitter and particularly the amoral cruelty of Twitterstorms, while at the same time asking really important questions about race, beauty, shadeism, celebrity, ‘influencers’, wealth and fame as the characters debate the rights and wrongs of black-chic-appropriating Kardashian-peripheral multi-millionaire Kylie Jenner. Danielle Vitalis was mesmeric as the would-be Jennercidal Cleo. Milli Bhatia’s production, all levels and bombardment, until it’s actually just ab out friendship and understanding. I felt the influence of this show in the end-of-the-year Midnight Movie, which feels, somehow, of a piece with this as part of a generational shift in how we make meaning in theatre. 

2.         Rosmersholm (Duke of York’s)

This has been the year of Ibsen, preposterously so. We’ve had two Enemies of the People, three rewrites of/responses to A Doll’s House (by Stef Smith, Sam Adamson, and Tanika Gupta), Pe(t)er Gyntat the National, a Hedda Gabler sequel at Chichester, Ghosts offered faithfully at the Royal and Derngate and entirely reimagined at the Kiln. And all this Ibsenalia shows few signs of abating, Stef Smith’s Nora is coming to the Young Vic and The National Theatre of Scotland in touring Kieran Hurley’s reworked Enemy of the People in the spring. I could have chosen more but I’ve decided to let the Duncan Macmillan/Ian Rickson Rosmersholm stand for the Ibsen year. I’ve seen the play twice before but never really quite ‘got’ it on stage; it’s always seemed both too ethereal and not ethereal enough. This version found the play for me with a faultless cast and Rickson’s unfashionable (but superb) unshowy uncompromising realism. Macmillan’s script makes a few strong decisions to sharpen the play’s connection to us now but nothing that anyone but the most hardline Ibsenite would object to. Like the audience at Three Sisters, I found myself, in the scene before the interval, gasping aloud at the brutality of the play, its shifts and turns. And somehow they made that impossible ending work. Why Ibsen now? I don’t know. Perhaps there is something about his stern scrutiny of personal hypocrisy and public posture that talks to us now; he empathises but he also judges’ there is a stern moralism that goes together with a recognition that we all fail. In any case, who knew, but Henrik Ibsen provided one of the great nights in the theatre this year.

1.         The Antipodes (National Theatre: Dorfman)

These top ten lists are, as we all know, completely ridiculous and it is 100% true that another day, or maybe even in an hour or two, I’d bump things off this list and put other things on. But I knew as I was watching Annie Baker’s The Antipodes that nothing would beat it this year. Let me be clear: there’s plenty I don’t understand about it, but I found it magnetic; the play could easily be seen as self-regarding about playwriting (it’s set in a writer’s room and is all about what makes a story), but it actually felt like a play about humanity, about the environmental catastrophe, about secrets and groups. It disregards the conventional rules about how you should tell a story, yet I found it compulsive and didn’t want it to end; it’s visually a pretty unexceptional experience (despite co-director Chloe Lamford’s clever, angular design), yet it explores its space exhaustively. It felt like attending a transformative ritual; there’s something primal and strange about the play as it inducts you into its mysteries. It has some affinities - on the most thematically general level - with Churchill’s play this year but really it’s like nothing else I’ve seen. It felt like it was teaching us all about how to write plays again. It’s stunning.

Midnight Movie

There’s a thing that happens to me. It started about eight years ago. If I wake up between 4 and 5 in the morning, my head is almost immediately flooded with the most horrible thoughts, thoughts that, in the light of day, I think are baseless: that I am about to die, that I am evil, worthless, that I am despised by everyone, that nothing I do is any good. I have to put music on or force my mind to concentrate hard on some neutral memory or topic or else I will lie there, filled with horror for an hour. As I say, in the morning, even only an hour or so later, these feelings and thoughts melt away and have no grip on me, but between 4 and 5 is the very witching hour of night. It feels like an hour where the distinction between truth and falsehood dissolves, where I am gripped by the worst possible interpretation of my actions, my value, my future.

This liminal zone between waking and sleeping, between truth and falsehood, resembles some experiences of the internet. Ideas bombard us in so disorderly a way that it becomes hard to organise these thoughts into a reasonable sequence or structure. Sometimes we find ourselves sifting information purely by confirmation bias: this idea chimes with what I believe so it is reliable, that idea is incompatible with my beliefs so it is propaganda. We have all done it; in fact, confirmation bias is a useful way of sifting the world - thought the better your understanding of the world already is, the more reliable confirmation bias is. If you have a wise and generous and subtle and diverse view of human beings and their motivations, you are likely to be able to spot frauds and bullshitters. Of course, if you have a pinched and jaundiced view, confirmation bias will just triage sense experience to encourage you in your prejudice. The internet offers us every view imaginable, so as we sift, so we are confirmed in what we already think. Truth and falsehood lag behind the forceful power of the attention-grabbing opinion. The internet exists in a twilight of truth values.

It seems to me that this is, in part, what Eve Leigh is talking about in Midnight Movie. The play unfolds ‘between midnight and dawn’. We watch a series of exchanges between … who? They’re not characters. Leigh describes them as avatars. They’re like the characters you create to send into a computer game. They are our representatives (and hers). They are two people and one: the conversations they have feel like the impossibly distant anonymous exchanges of an online chatroom or messaging service (thousand of miles apart) or the fevered conversations you might have with yourself in the witching hour (a synapse apart). There’s a hallucinatory quality to that which reminds me of a dream (‘you were in the dream but you were also two people…’). And indeed the whole production feels like a nightmare, with its jarring, agitating colour palette, its alarming shifts and clashes of style, its juddering clashes of scale (there’s a bed upstage that is unsettling in its dimensions, its apparent clash with perspective), its suffocating darkness, its glaring brightness, its impossible inside-outness, its lurches from laughter to horror, from misery to exuberance. Midnight Movie is the midnight movie in all our heads, playing as we pass between deep sleeping and head towards the light.

How to describe it? It’s a series of experiences, conversations, paranoid delusions, stories and music. Yes, music: the soundtrack to the whole thing is Janelle Monáe’s mindfuckingly wonderful, Prince-reincarnated, polysexual, polyfunky single ‘Make Me Feel’. The song is sampled and distorted and grabbed and groped and thrown about right the way through the whole thing, like it’s playing on your phone by the bed and infiltrating your dreams. It also represents an important part of Midnight Movie, which is a reaching beyond the pain and despair to something utterly liberated, something beyond all confinements, beyond being trapped in your head, in your body, finding a place where you are never in the wrong place. Without this vision of freedom, the show would be too dark to bear. Of course, against the light of that almost-impossible horizon, the show is also almost too dark to bear.

So, come on then, how to describe it? Nadia Nadarajah and Tom Penn are on stage pretty much the whole time. They are the avatars and they tell each other stories. Some of these are internet memes (like the weird story of the death of Elisa Lam); others are mythical stories (probably); others are personal stories (probably). There are urban myths, horror stories, legends, news stories, anecdotes and sometimes these stories jump tracks from one to the other halfway through. (Oddly, it reminded me of a very different play, but Caryl Churchill’s Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp, which shares with this a fascination with how the mythic intertwines with our ordinary lives. In fact while we’re on this topic, so does Annie Baker’s The Antipodes. This has been a year of worrying about story.) And the show is also trying to find a theatrical form for representing the internet or our experience of it, with its bombardment and surfing and confusion of real and fake and of the serious and the trivial and the way we have 40 tabs open at any one time like a million people are shouting stories at you as you sleep. We’ve been here before a bit with Tim Price’s Teh Internet is Serious Business, though while that wanted us to think more broadly and publicly about the international politics of the internet, this is about the experiential, personal, subjective feeling of what it’s like to be trapped and freed in a digital body.)

I do love a theatre show that seems quite unlike anything I’ve seen before and yet also, somehow, captures something about who we are now and that’s what this does.

Crucial though is the mode of storytelling. Nadia Nadarajah performs in BSL, but also dances, while Tom Penn speaks in English, and also drums. (Yes, drums! There are drums in this! There should be more drums in things.) Much of the text is projected on the wall, along with a near-constant stream of recorded and live images and sound. (The sound: buzzes and pulses and glitches and screams.) There does not appear to be a particularly clear continuity of character; at some moments they seem to be figures miles apart in an internet relationship where she gives him RT instructions to carry out. But sometimes they seem to be just mates telling each other stories. And sometimes they seem to be the same person; there’s a particular moment towards the end, where Tom is speaking and Nadia is signing and they are both telling the same story and whose story it is starts to dissolve. Is it Tom’s story that Nadia is signing? Is it Nadia’s story that Tom is voicing? Is it one of the avatar’s stories? A character’s story? Is it Eve Leigh’s story? Is it more than one of these? The edges of identity seem to blur and split and open up.

Because again, this is a play about liberation. I found the show claustrophobic and dark and brutal, maybe just because of my own night horrors (confirmation bias), but I can also see that there’s a vision of freedom in the digital body - that cluster of bytes and pixels and cookies and traces that we scatter across the web. Particularly because of the emphasis on disability - the way that the wrong places can make you feel you have the wrong body, the way theatres are brilliant because you have to be ‘there’, but terrible because sometimes ‘there’ is the wrong place for your body - there’s something about being able to move beyond the confines of the body, to go from analogue to digital body and reach out that is valuable and exciting here, even though the show also knows how compromised that is.

Artistically, these devices are theatrically thrilling. The words on the wall duplicate or are duplicated by BSL which duplicate or are duplicated by English. It displaces the action of the play; where is the ‘central’ point of expression here? It’s nowhere; this is a decentred play. (This is like any play, of course, which is not fully expressed on the page or the stage, and Leigh makes much of her absent presence, the play being her own avatar.) I loved moments where Tom Penn, maybe accidentally, voicing the words that are projected on the wall, slightly diverged from the projected text and we felt there a gap between analogue and digital, flesh and data, between theatre and media, live and recorded. At one moment - I’m sure an accident - we’re hearing a story about a man watching a website to discover whether his brother died in prison; as the story continued, the projected words talk about ‘his brother’ but Tom said ‘his wife’ before correcting himself… and suddenly a forking path opened up, another story arose from the play like a soul leaving a body.

Did I like it? Well yes. I mean, I found it hard and unsettling for all the reasons I’ve mentioned. I don’t share Leigh’s conviction that fiction is an irresponsible delusion in theatre and I found a few moments of the show a bit arch, and others a bit self-regarding, but hell that’s also the social media transmit mode. What I loved in Rachel Bagshaw’s production is that it simultaneously deprives you of comfort while generously giving you everything else and that felt like it captured something of what it’s like to be us now. I find Eve Leigh’s work personally very sympathetic (indeed, though it’s completely different, my own play Static shares with Midnight Movie a desire to do something difficult and theatrical with BSL and indeed with Leigh’s earlier play The Trick a desire to talk about magic and grief; Leigh is a completely different writer, of course, but I do feel myself reaching out across the servers). It’s a really bold experiment. It’s full of the feeling of 2019. It’s definitely worth a click.