Green-Eyed Monster

‘Do you have anything lined up after this run is over?’ I ask one of the actors in Chekhov in Hell.

‘Well, I’ve got a couple of weeks off, then I start rehearsals for a show at Hampstead,’ she replies.

I’m amazed to feel a stab of outrage and jealousy. Another show? How is that possible? You’re MY actor. Does this mean so little to you? What, you just toss this aside like an old tissue?

It’s the weirdest feeling and completely unreasonable, obviously. Of course, it’s all about the intense promiscuity of theatre. We work together for short periods, shutting everything else out, it’s emotional, physical, sensual, we promise the world to each other, we meet in the evenings, we go to unusual places, confidences are exchanges over drinks, and then we move on. It’s like an affair. But actors are used to it. I don’t imagine they all feel the deep bluesy heaviness I feel the day after a show closes. It’s one of the uncanny things about actors. Their ability to access that well of feeling with sincerity and accuracy and then to leave it behind. I’m sure writers have an equivalent but damned if I can think what it is now.

I think the problem is seeing making theatre is falling in love. I need to think of it as just sex.

On Being Loved

Simon Stokes came back to see Chekhov in Hell last night, after a few days away from it. His view is that the performances have softened slightly. One of the hazards that actors have to navigate round is wanting to be loved by the audience. There is a complex negotiation at work because you have to communicate with them and there are many skills that we all have to ensure the quality of that communication; some of these skills are ‘charm’ and ‘likeability’ and various personal qualities that make sure the channel of communication is open. In this play, only Chekhov can really be liked by the audience; if we bond ourselves to him then we see the play through his eyes and we experience his dislocating horror at the quality of the contemporary world. All of the characters have their clear good intentions but they have become twisted out of shape in their actions. And if the actors start trying to persuade the audience of their characters’ essential sweetness, the play becomes noisy and confused.

Simon’s talk was uncompromising. ‘We don’t need to re-rehearse unless you really want to. It’s basically all working but it’s got soft. What you have to remember is that these characters are cunts. You. You’re a cunt. You? You’re a cunt too. You two, you’re both cunts. That Alan Sugar? He’s a complete cunt. Everyone’s a cunt. And you have to remember that; don’t make them like you because you’re all cunts.’

It seems to have done the trick.

You're Having a Laugh

​Johnny Broadbent and Ruth Everett in Chekhov in Hell

Laughing in the theatre is a funny thing. I’ve realised doing this play that quite a few people don’t like doing it. And other people only like doing it. Generally, the play gets a tremendous response and one of the key ways you know it’s getting a tremendous response is that the audience laugh and laugh a lot. On the first night, I began to wonder if the audience would ever stop laughing; some of the younger audiences have actually laughed to distracting lengths and at distracting volumes. Ultimately, that’s the least of an audience’s vices but I have sometimes wondered if the laughter isn’t prompted by some determination not to let the play move into the somewhat darker areas that it finds in the final quarter.

And then there are the laughter-haters. Not often but occasionally, we’ve had the response ‘well I suppose it’s very funny...’ as if this is the least of all virtues, something cheaply won. Actually making an audience laugh is very hard; making a whole audience laugh requires skill and precision and all of the virtues of good theatre - a sense of pace, volume, situation, character, language, feeling... But some audiences distrust laughter, think it’s unworthy of them and of art.

My feeling with this play is that of course it’s funny. The basic conceit - Anton Chekhov awaking from his hospital bed after a 100-year coma - is funny; it’s absurd; it’s silly. If I tried to stack on top of it a deep psychological tragedy, the audience’s response, quite rightl, would be ‘oh come on’. The play works through laughter, through satire, through sensing the absurd in ordinary situations. It reframes the everyday and finds the insanity of it. And that’s funny.

The problem for some audiences is that they don’t like to laugh if they don’t know why they’re laughing. And it’s not always immediately clear why something is funny; fundamentally the play does not advertise its world view, its improving message, so where is the laughter? What’s it for? This seems to unsettle some audiences and stop them laughing.

Some have wondered where the positivity is in the play. It’s there. It’s in the funny. Because if we can laugh at the horrors of the world, we are a step on the way to imagining a different world, with different priorities, different ways of being with each other.

Of course, I say all this because I’m a bit of a laughter whore. I love the sound of laughter in an audience of one of my plays. I sit in the audience mentally flicking forward to when the next big laugh is due. I get tense before a big joke, hoping it’ll be delivered smoothly and smartly, wanting that big shout of laughter, that convulsion that suggests an audience caught unawares by the joke, giving themselves to it. I do have to remind myself that laughter isn’t the only response I wrote the play for. There are some rich jokes and some dislocatingly odd jokes and a few deliberately silly jokes (there’s a scene quite near the end, ‘The Search for Chemical Weapons’, which has some of the dumbest jokes, but it’s there to flush out the laughter, to give people some fun before the laughter starts getting hurting and painful). The shape of the play is firm and takes us through laughter to something sadder and bleaker.

The persistence of laughter, to me, is a moment of the comic sublime. For Kant and others the sublime is that odd experience of simultaneous or almost simultaneous horror and pleasure at seeing something like a vast and raging sea, or contemplating the enormity of the universe. Kant says the displeasure comes from the vast disparity of scale or power between us and the thing we’re experiencing. We feel crushed, negligible, infinitesimally insignificant, wholly powerless. But this is only the failure of our imaginations to take in the experience as an experience. Then our rational mind comes in to affirm that even though the site may appear infinite, all objects must be  the movement through pain to affirm our ability to see it as something other than it sees itself. To say, this hurts but still, even so, I won’t be beaten by it.

So laughter is part of the play not some kind of decoration or distraction. It’s also part of the play’s idea structure. Laughter is part of its argument (if it has, as such, an argument). The funny is at least part of the point.

On the Couch

The show is bedding in and the strong sense overtakes me that I’m really a spare part. As John Bird, channelling Denis Thatcher, put it, ‘about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party’. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, as long as you feel you’ve done your work and it’s taxiing nicely to take-off. But it’s also a thing about where you put yourself.

I think of Alan Bennett’s diary entry from last year in the London Review of Books which makes the point very well:

7 November 2009: It’s at this point, a couple of days into previews, that the author begins to take his or her leave of the play. It’s nothing to do with a sense of work completed, which I seldom have anyway, or now the play is up and running a desire to get on with something else. Fat chance. No. While it’s psychologically healthy (no sense in hanging around after all), it’s because at this point the cast have been allotted their dressing-rooms. Previously the rehearsal room has been the meeting place where besides work you gossip and have coffee and, if you’re like me and are used to working on your own, have a nice, gregarious time. Now everyone escept the playwright has a room to go to and a couch to lie on, the real meeting place henceforth the stage on which every night the actors rendez-vous to do the play. For the author it’s over.

Plymouth

​Simon Gregor perhaps in supplication to Lyn Gardner

I came down to Plymouth on Sunday. On Monday we were in TR2 the extraordinary theatre-making complex that the Theatre Royal got built seven years ago. It has aircraft-hanger-size rooms for costume, props, set painting and rehearsal. The Germans probably have a word for this: Eine Teatermaschine. A morning of working sections and notes; the afternoon a run. The rehearsal room is vast, high high ceilings, and a run of windows at chest height around the walls, looking out on reclaimed land and rubble. The run? Hard to say. It hung together, felt a bit long, very disjointed. I made a few notes, decided not to give them. I think a couple of scenes have got baggy and out of shape, but really only two. The cast are in good spirits though and the play still remains surprising and fitfully funny. What’s curious about this moment is the way that all your confidence evaporates. Or rather, the confidence you are required, as a writer, to have in the script, and I am very confident about that, is replaced with a new wonder about actual audiences. Will they like this production? Will they tune into it? Will they get it?

On Tuesday and Wednesday we were in the theatre. The technical rehearsal (where the lights, sound, props movements, costume changes and other stuff are painstakingly agreed and fixed) is notoriously boring, frustrating for everyone except the designers and the director. Actually, even for them too. But it’s also something I find very moving, especially in a beautifully kitted-out theatre like the Drum. It’s the sight of everyone - someone up a ladder, another person typing into a laptop, actors walking on in new costumes, the director in intense discussion with the sound designer - all engaged in their separate activities but all focused on a common goal. That is, you hope so.

The technical rehearsal was very slow; it was scheduled for a day and a half but ended up knocking the dress rehearsal to the Thursday. The main problem is the beginning which is enormously elaborate to set up and difficult to strike. Then there’s a complicated short montage scene with half a dozen little set ups. But mostly the issue has been style; how to light a show like this, with its stark playfulness with theatrical representation. Some of the designers’ ideas were just too statement-y. The play strives to avoid editorialising (in a way that even I find uncomfortable in places) and the production needs to do the same. I’m pleased to see that the scene titles are being projected onto the set; less happy that through font, size and placement, the titles seem to be commenting on themselves and the action. Fortunately, Simon’s all over this and they calm down.

The lighting similarly started commentating on the action. Not just a prostitute’s room but a seedy room. Colour starts telling us what to think. Again, Simon reins this back, makes everything starker - and crisper, cleaner - and the scenes seem to me, at least, to be funnier. The sound delights me; there’s a curious Russian piece by Cafe Sputnik which starts as a slavic lament and then reveals itself as a piece of contemporary electronica; it bridges the prologue and first scene beautifully. Then there’s a sleazy bit of dance music by Fedde Le Grand and Ida Corr called ‘Let Me Think About It’ which graces the lapdancing scene. Elsewhere there are some lovely little stings of music, sound, disruptions that keep the thing tugging forward.

Never having been through this kind of tech before, I’m struck by how flexible the system is. Not everything is ready before it begins; costume appears in pieces through the day. Chekhov himself emerges slowly; first the beard which Simon’s been growing, then the suit, then the pince-nez, and then a very impressive wig which manages to complete an extraordinary transformation. Chekhov is before us in all his iconic glory. Lights are changing through scenes, things are provisional, altered, transformed, debated over and locked off. Often I think it’s here that directors come into their own and the sense of them keeping a whole show in one head is most

Simon’s broader transformation is the other story of the week. Chekhov in this play is a tricky part. He has very little to say but is on stage almost all the time. His journey is sketched in through hints and indications and the actor is obliged to dig for it and find ways to bring it out through tiny moments. Simon’s always been good - he’s an eccentric, wiry, edgy character, prone to burst into a curious voice, stray fragment of obscene language, even a funny walk - but here, this week, his Chekhov has been striding forward: he’s an innocent abroad, saddened by the world, perplexed at times, devastated at others. Does he understand what he’s seeing? Sometimes it seems not, but then cumulatively he carried a weight of moral despair. Simon’s found a character for him that is part-M. Hulot, part-Peter Sellars in Being There. Simon Stokes is fond of describing him as a Wandering Jew, an exile and a moral force.

And then first night. The two hours or so before first night are probably the loneliest I’ve felt in years. Not just because I don’t have Lilla here in Plymouth with me, though that is difficult, but also because a lot rests on my shoulders but it’s not a burden to share. Of course, we all made this show together, but, more than anything I’ve done before, there’s a focus of attention on the play and therefore the writer. The cast have each other and the adrenalin of performance; Simon’s in his own theatre and has experience and an apparatus around him. I took myself off and ate tapas at the theatre next door. Then, half an hour or so before the show, I turn up at the theatre. Some familiar faces, David Prescott, Simon of course, Louise Schumann. A large, young audience, which seems to me a good thing and we go in.

The cast are nervous. They’ve had a nervy, though sound, dress rehearsal only a couple of hours before. A couple of them had disastrous line-failures that I’ve never seen. The first scene, which plays entirely in Russian and German, feels agonizingly long. It isn’t, but one realises that when you have the witty idea to start by alienating the audience, that means you’re going to start by alienating the audience. I remember the same thing in Static. I wanted to disrupt the play early on, give a brutal experience of loss and grief, in all its unpleasantness; short, broken scenes, incomplete fragments of dialogue, loud aggressive music (Sonic Youth’s ‘Tunic’). And as I watched it in the Tron, I thought, holy crap, this is unpleasant.

With this play, however, it’s worth it because there’s an immediate pay-off that releases tension and forces a laugh into the show. And it goes pretty smoothly from then on. The audience warm immensely to both Chekhov and Nicola. Nicola is our guide and hands over smoothly to Chekhov who then becomes our horrified Virgil through the Inferno of modern life. Some lines continue to elude their speakers, but the show goes very well indeed. One scene - the scene, I might say, that only four days ago Simon was toying with cutting - gets a round of applause (a young guy behind me, as the lights went down at the end of it, breathed ‘brilliant’...). The older audience adore Clare Willis, the hapless Police Community Support Officer, and identify the absurdity immediately. The younger audience respond readily to things like Chekhov on Twitter; their laugh at ‘OMFG! I heart Justin Bieber’ was the loudest of the night. Surprisingly perhaps, Marcia, the R&B star, got a muted response (though the ‘why you have shit in fridge’ doesn’t seem to fail). Sustained applause at the end.

I felt exhausted. While I can’t say I feel nervous exactly, the tension builds through the day and at each moment I’m flicking ahead to things to come, possible pitfalls, risky moments, but also solid gold laughs that I think will comfort the audience and me. So when the whole thing is over, I just feel like falling asleep in my seat. At the Drum of course you have to walk out with the audience; the risk of hearing some caustic remark is high. Luckily all I heard was ‘Ohmygod that was SO brilliant, but I don’t have a clue what it was about’, which I’ll settle for.

We all repair to the pub and talk contentedly, frantically, the nervous energy pouring out of us. I feel guarded somehow, probably because I’m loving this production so much and I’m concerned, like Bob in the play, about getting intense. In truth, even though we’ve only had half a week of performances, I’m already feeling that desperate sadness that comes from a show ending. Actors are, maybe, used to it, the promiscuity of the theatre, each period of intensity dropped and another picked up. I noticed that a member of the cast already has another show lined up after this one closes and I felt a moment of intense affronted jealousy. It’s emotionally exhausting.

And now we wait to see what audiences do and how the critics respond.