Rebecca - Kneehigh

I’ve not read the novel or seen any other adaptations of it, so I was coming to Rebecca fresh. But regardless of my knowledge of the book, it’s clear that Kneehigh’s stage production of Rebecca is a very inventive adaptation.

As soon as you see the set, you know you’re in for something special. Part grand house in ruins; part seashore; broken staircases running across the stage. And the boat looming centre-stage throughout the first half, reminding us always that Rebecca’s absence is a very real presence in the house.

If any of the audience at Eastbourne’s Devonshire Park Theatre (15^th April 2015) was expecting a straight adaptation, with ‘realistic’ sets and the usual period drama tropes, they would have been taken by surprise by Kneehigh’s Rebecca.

This is a much more stylised adaptation. Set, sound, lighting, puppetry and music all combine to tell the tale and draw out the themes. Such as the combination of jazz music on a gramophone and sea shanties being played by the actor-musicians: the clash of the sophisticated and the elemental.

Obviously if you’ve seen Kneehigh before, or know them by reputation, then you know that they’re nothing if not inventive. Rebecca features their trademark music, comedy and playfulness and ties these up in a full on, dark, ambitious production.

I remember seeing Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge in the cinema when it came out, and having to take a moment at the end just to recover from the force of the visual and aural whirlwind that had just swept around me.

I felt a bit like that at the end of Rebecca.

Very much worth seeing.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I’ve just realised that I’ve only been writing about theatre recently, and haven’t told you about any of the books I’ve been reading.

The most recent one I finished was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This is an incredibly vivid evocation of a time, a place and an attitude. So much so that you almost feel as if you’re experiencing it yourself.

Except that there are jarring points for a 21^st century reader. You rush along with it up to a certain point and then you think – oh, hang on, that’s not on.

This is especially true, for me, in the depiction of and attitudes towards women. I’d be really interested in reading a Wide Sargasso Sea kind of novel from a female character’s perspective. Maybe one of Dean’s wives, or one of the Mexican prostitutes, or even Sal’s aunt. What are their stories?

But On the Road is about capturing one man’s impressions of his travels and of his friends and of the people he encounters. And what it sets out to do, it does perfectly. You can definitely see why it’s called a classic.

Doctor Scroggy's War - Shakespeare's Globe

Well this was all pretty timely.

2014 is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One. I have recently been re-reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration – a novel about shell-shocked patients in a WW1 psychiatric hospital. And the day before I went to see Doctor Scroggy’s War at the Globe (which I saw on 27th September 2014), the Commons voted in favour of military intervention in Iraq.

So let’s take those one by one, shall we?

It’s a century since WW1 started. The Great War looms large in our culture at the best of times, but this year it’s everywhere. I imagine that’s why the Globe put Doctor Scroggy’s War on this summer.

The anniversary also means that we’re looking back and evaluating the events of a hundred years ago. There’s recently been a backlash in certain quarters against the widely held view of the war as a futile tragedy of epic proportions. Some are trying to claim it as a shining example of what makes Britain great. (And this is when I can’t help turning into one of the History Boys: “You can’t explain away the poetry”, I cry!).

Doctor Scroggy’s War recognises both perspectives. One of the play’s main characters, a soldier named Twigg, wants to return to the war after being injured – he enjoys the frontline action. And though other characters disagree with him and find it incomprehensible, his attitude is recognised as existing, alongside other responses.

That’s something the play has in common with Regeneration. A complex look at the motivations and responses of those involved in war – and, especially, those injured in war.

Doctor Scroggy’s War is concerned with physical injury, but emphasises the role of psychological healing as well. It looks at the real-life Dr Gillies’ pioneering facial reconstruction techniques alongside his alter ego Dr Scroggy’s important sense of fun. Regeneration, meanwhile, looks at the pioneering psychological therapy of the real-life Dr Rivers, and examines how psychological scarring can produce physical symptoms. Both pieces deal with the crossover between the psychological and the physical.

Both Doctor Scroggy’s War and Regeneration also mix fact and fiction in their storytelling, with real-life characters interacting with fictional ones. It’s a thought-provoking mix when you’re navigating your way through competing narratives about the war. That blur between ‘true’ and ‘made up’ and whether things are any less true for being made up.

And that brings us to current world events, where it sometimes feels like WW3 is happening on the sly. The competing narratives, the debate over what is true or not – these don’t ever go away. We might wonder how we can learn from the past (and there were certainly some mutterings amongst the Globe audience about how we don’t seem to).

But what I feel I’ve learnt from these plays, books, poems and other recollections of the First World War is that there is no single past. There is no standalone truth or one story that makes sense of it all.

In Doctor Scroggy’s War, themes of national identity, class politics, and gender inequality were also touched upon. More viewpoints to consider; more clashes and crossovers between different truths. And, as befits the Globe space, various characters addressed the audience directly at times, giving their individual perspective on events.

My favourite moment was when Twigg said to the audience: “You all know what’s going to happen to me.” It was a brave recognition that we all know the drill – we’ve seen the films and read the stories – and we, as an audience, know how these narratives play out.

But just acknowledging that challenged us to recognise the very ‘story-ness’ that most stories want you to ignore.

We were in a theatre, watching a play. There was a jig at the end. The play may have featured real people and real events, but it was a story nonetheless. One story amongst many. A narrative. A response. A truth?

The Outsider by Albert Camus

This is going to be a short one - but then, I suppose it is quite a short book.

I recently read The Outsider by Camus (L'Etranger in the original French, sometimes translated as The Stranger). The original book, first published in 1942, was clearly written as a demonstration of a philosophical viewpoint - existentialism or a variation on it - but I couldn't help thinking that, looked at today, the hero of the book would probably be diagnosed with Asperger's or something along those lines.

I was talking with a friend who had also recently read The Outsider, and we both agreed that it reminded us slightly of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

An interesting thought, that's all.

The Canterbury Tales - The Pantaloons

Like a lot of people, I studied part of The Canterbury Tales at school. I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t remember a great deal about the text – except that I remember thinking it wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be.

At around the same time, I saw the film A Knight’s Tale, with Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany. So Chaucer was always that slightly impish Paul Bettany figure in my head.

These two vague notions are probably always going to inform any encounter I have with The Canterbury Tales. And happily, they fit right in with The Pantaloons’ take on the tales – which is not difficult at all, and definitely slightly impish.

I went to the Underground Theatre in Eastbourne to see The Pantaloons’ production of The Canterbury Tales (10^th Nov 2013). As soon as we walked in, we could feel a bit of a buzz in the air. The cast were in character, chatting with audience members – and, unlike the very reserved audience The Pantaloons had to play to at Michelham Priory in the summer (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with largely the same cast), this audience was chatting back.

It may have been partly because everyone seemed to know each other (as the cast remarked upon more than once), but there was definitely a friendly sort of atmosphere in the almost sold-out UGT.

And that atmosphere carried on right the way through this colourful, funny and energetic take on The Canterbury Tales. Incorporating song, rhyme, puppets, chickens, Shakespeare, opera, improvisation and more, The Pantaloons took us through each of Chaucer’s tales in turn. They’d even printed a list in the programme so you could mark which tales you liked best, and at the end they asked for our favourite. (I think it was the chickens that won the audience vote in Eastbourne).

I’d seen The Pantaloons do The Canterbury Tales before – a couple of years ago, with a different cast and out in the open air. Having only seen them perform outdoors before, I wasn’t sure how their style would translate to an indoor setting.

But it was great. The house lights were only half dimmed, so we could all still see each other (which helped with the audience interaction bits), and in a way I think the indoor setting actually helped to build the atmosphere. Walking through the doors into the auditorium was a bit like going through the wardrobe into Narnia. Outside was the normal, workaday world – and suddenly inside we were in the bright, boisterous Pantaloon-land.

I used to work front of house in a theatre, and one of my favourite parts of the job was seeing the audience leave with smiles on their faces at the end of a show. I think I would have enjoyed working for a Pantaloons performance.

The Pantaloons are currently on tour with The Canterbury Tales and Grimm Fairy Tales (which I’ll be seeing when they return to Eastbourne in December). See their website www.thepantaloons.co.uk for full tour details.

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

This was something of an enlightening read for me – for two main reasons. I’ve never read a graphic novel before. And I know next to nothing about the culture and history of Iran.

So Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi was educational on both counts.

First off, let’s deal with the graphic novel thing. Being a literature sort of person, I’d probably been guilty of an unconscious snootiness regarding graphic novels. Having read comic books as a kid (mainly Asterix and Tintin – sometimes in the original French as my dad thought this would help us learn the language!), I associated the form with light-hearted fiction for children.

Nothing wrong with light-hearted fiction for children – I read quite a lot of children’s books – but I think I may have been a bit suspicious of the comic-style form being used for adults. I certainly didn’t approach Persepolis expecting to be challenged by it intellectually.

But I was challenged by it. Not in terms of the words or syntax used, but by the ideas expressed and the themes explored. This is not a light-hearted ‘comic’. It graphically depicts violence, murder and suicide. The characters swear. They talk about sex, politics, religion. And through the words and pictures that Marjane Satrapi uses to tell her story, we are guided through a turbulent time in Iran’s history.

Persepolis is autobiographical, and through seeing how our main character’s life changes, we are given a glimpse into the political and religious upheavals in Iran in the late 20^th century. It’s pretty hard going sometimes. Some moments are powerfully moving and some are ideologically challenging.

I know very little about Iran’s history, and of its culture I only really know what I see on the TV news or what I’ve read about in books like Reading Lolita in Tehran. Most of what I know is about the oppression of women. And while this is undeniably a big deal in Persepolis, it’s made clear that it’s all part of a larger tapestry.

So this book opened a window. I learnt something about the revolution and the unrest that came before and after it. I couldn’t help reflecting on the situation in Egypt at the moment as I read it. I also learnt a bit about Iran’s war with Iraq (I was just about being born when this was actually happening), and it made me wonder about all the subsequent conflicts in and around the area.

What struck me most was how complicated it all is. The drawings in this book may all be in black and white, but the narrative itself doesn’t fall into black and white morality. I think I’ve come away from reading Persepolis feeling even more confused about Iran as a country. But then, perhaps that’s what happens when you have a little more knowledge. It’s easier to be certain when you’re ignorant.

So there are books that come and go and don’t leave much impression, and there are books that leave you thinking. I know that next time Iran is mentioned on the news I’ll be thinking about this book. And I know that next time someone recommends a graphic novel to me, I won’t be so slow to read it. Persepolis has left me just that little bit more knowledgeable, and just that little bit more open-minded.

Always good things for a book to do.

Sherlock Holmes - The Pantaloons

Playful, fun, inventive, silly, clever. If you’ve seen a Pantaloons show before, you’ll already know the adjectives I’m going to use. Irreverent – that’s another one.

The Pantaloons are touring two productions this summer, and I went to see their Sherlock Holmes when they stopped off at The Scoop at More London on Thursday 13^th June.

This production features an all-new cast for The Pantaloons, and, with it being early in the tour, I did get the feeling that some of them are still getting used to The Pantaloons’ brand of carefully-constructed anarchy. But the ingredients are all there – the audience interaction, the over-the-top characterisations, the songs, the self-referential jokes, the doubling up of roles – and, despite the lack of familiar faces, this is definitely still a Pantaloons show.

There’s always a slightly pantomime-like feel to Pantaloons productions, and Sherlock Holmes is no exception. With an all-male cast, comprising one Holmes, one Watson, and two energetic others playing all the remaining roles, there’s plenty of cross-dressing – and knowing references to their casting choices.

Mrs Hudson’s grumble that she’s not a tea lady – in fact she’s not even a lady elicits a big laugh from the audience, and the justification of alternating who gets to play the role of Moriarty is inspired. I couldn’t help thinking of the recent NT production of Frankenstein at this point, where Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the roles of Frankenstein and his monster.

Of course, both of these actors have played modern-day Sherlocks in recent years – and, of course, both of those adaptations (along with the Robert Downey Jr. films) are referenced by The Pantaloons in this production. If there is a contemporary reference to be made, rest assured that The Pantaloons will make it. I suppose that’s another way it’s all a bit like panto.

Personally, my favourite bits of Sherlock Holmes were the silliest bits: Holmes and Moriarty jumping and sinking very slowly to their (presumed) deaths; Elliot Quinn’s noisy Dr Roylott in the tale of The Speckled Band; the so-much-fun-they-did-it-twice Circle Line gag. It’s that mix of self-referential knowingness and pure, exuberant silliness that makes Pantaloons productions such a joy to watch and interact with.

I’m looking forward to seeing their take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream later in the season.

The Pantaloons are on tour with Sherlock Holmes and A Midsummer Night's Dream at venues across the UK this summer. Take a look at their website for full tour details: www.thepantaloons.co.uk

 

UPDATE APRIL 2014: You can see my review of the 2014 indoor tour version of this production here

Something Very Far Away – Unicorn Theatre & The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann)

This weekend I saw two things about love, loss, memory, hope, and an attempt by a man to recapture – in one way or another – a woman from his past.

On Friday night I went to the Unicorn Theatre to see Something Very Far Away, a piece of theatre originally intended for children that has gained the attention of a wider audience. Involving puppetry and projection to form live animation, there was no dialogue. Instead, it had a beautifully effective soundtrack including live guitar music alongside recorded pieces from the likes of Sigur Ros.

The following day, I went to the cinema to see the new adaptation of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann. Visually stunning, with another very effective soundtrack, this film was made all the more moving by my having seen Something Very Far Away the previous day.

I was originally going to write about each of these two pieces separately, but seeing them back to back has linked them in my head and it’s now difficult to think of one without referring to the other. The themes of the two just reflect each other so neatly.

Both pieces look at the lengths (physical and metaphorical) that someone will go to in order to recapture the past. While Gatsby throws elaborate parties in order to attract the attention of his former lover Daisy, in Something Very Far Away our hero builds a rocket and travels into space to look back at Earth. He knows that the further into space you look, the further back in time you see – and all he wants to see is the wife he lost. Again and again, he revisits the pain of her death.

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby turns his house into a sort of amusement park to attract Daisy, and in Something Very Far Away our unnamed astronomer makes a rocket out of his house, which blasts off into space to let him catch a glimpse of his wife. Both men try to create physical solutions to ease their emotional pain. They are both motivated by their love and loss to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, and as Nick notes about Gatsby, it is hope that powers them along.

In Something Very Far Away, the puppeteers, cameras and props were all deliberately visible to the audience, so we could see how each piece of animation was created in front of us. And The Great Gatsby also emphasises its own form, what with the story within a story frame, anachronistic soundtrack and made-for-3D flourishes. The construction of the story, or the memory, or the illusion, is revealed in both pieces: we see – physically – how the past seeps into the present and the present seeps into the memory of the past.

Despite this sense of physicality, though, both The Great Gatsby and Something Very Far Away ultimately represent the past as enticing but just out of reach. Gatsby’s green light is always on the other side of the bay, and the astronomer’s wife is always at the other end of the telescope. The last lines from The Great Gatsby struck me as heartbreakingly relevant to both pieces:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further ... And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Bright Young Things - Scarlett Thomas

Branching out into books this time, I’ve been reading Bright Young Things by Scarlett Thomas. Originally published in 2001, it’s stuffed full of pop culture references from the nineties / early noughties – some of which I can remember, some of which (namely the video game references) are entirely lost on me.

With not a great deal of action in the story, the book is basically about a group of twenty-somethings sitting around talking about not very much. In each chapter, the focus is on one particular character’s thoughts and perspective. There is no consistent overarching or omniscient narrative, as we spend time with each of the 6 characters and we only ever know what at least one of the characters knows. This means that the central mystery in the book is subject to a lot of speculation but never resolved to a certainty.

I guess this is what Scarlett Thomas means in her preface to this 2012 edition, when she claims that it’s a postmodern novel. Lots of individual perspectives give us lots of stories but no central ‘truth’, and the characters discuss their own predicament with about the same degree of attention they give to discussing Neighbours.

We’ve all been there, I suppose.

The other comparison the author draws in her preface is to the turn of the century reality shows, such as Big Brother and Castaway. Inevitably, seeing a group of characters removed from their own environment and put in a house together on a remote island will conjure up certain associations for those of us who watched TV in 2000. And that the characters argue, pair up, talk rubbish, and worry about their supply of cigarettes, makes it all the more familiar.

This must have been a very zeitgeist-y book at the time. Now, just over a decade later, it definitely feels like it’s from another era. What’s the latest thing? Is there a post-postmodernism? Is there a novel being written now that captures 2013 in the way that Bright Young Things captures the turn of the millennium?

A quick word on the book’s cover, because it’s always fun to analyse a cover. It’s clearly been re-done to resemble the author’s other, later, works and to fit in with their distinctive visual branding. But there are palm trees on the cover, and compass motifs. Did they not read the book? It’s not a desert island the characters are on – in the book they guess at Scotland!

I must admit I was expecting something quite different having only seen the cover – something more Robinson Crusoe-ish, possibly.

And the blurb on the back of the book, too, makes it sound like there’s more plot than there actually is, as if the characters might try to escape rather than just sit around talking. I’m not saying that that’s what the book ought to have been like; just that the cover suggested something different from what was inside.

This is essentially a book about flawed, not always particularly pleasant people talking to each other. And while it sometimes felt too much like a writing exercise in character and perspective, I still found it an engaging read. Not as page-turning as The End of Mr Y, but an interesting time capsule from the turn of the millennium all the same.