Staging history

This week on CW, playwright Barney Norris asks why Margaret Thatcher has become such a popular subject for dramatic treatment today. Matt Trueman reports from the London International Mime festival, and reviews other London theatre including Simon Stephens’ The Trial of Ubu at Hampstead Theatre and Nick Payne’s Constellations at the Royal Court. And Lewis Richards reviews Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum.

27 January 2012

Reading Margaret Thatcher

Why is Maggie such a current issue in the arts?

Investigating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher may seem, at first, to be a retreat from engaging with modern politics, but I believe exactly the opposite is taking place when contemporary artists turn to her. One way of understanding the present is to interrogate the past.

Watch from an angle

The Trial of Ubu, Hampstead Theatre, London

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

McCullin’s War

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, Imperial War Museum, London

A key characteristic of the exhibition is the lack of colour photos used by Don McCullin during his career. McCullin said himself, ‘I thought that black and white images in war were much more powerful,’ and his photos reinforce this statement.

A good old fashioned postmodern rom-com

Constellations, Royal Court, London

Payne isn’t conclusively determinist. His characters still act freely, but their freedom is more limited than either would like to believe. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb.

To what end?

L’Autre, Southbank Centre, London

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

Tranquilised gentility

Mundo Paralelo, Southbank Centre, London

Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

Lost in a deluge of action

Our New Girl, Bush Theatre, London

Harris throws in just enough sinister hints about this new nanny, and her oddly intimate knowledge of Hazel’s family,  to keep these early encounters fizzing nicely. But despite these Ortonesque overtones, the atmosphere gradually flattens and the over-defined characters, with little room to develop, hit a dead end.

A nice line in feigned ineptitude

Pss Pss, Southbank Centre, London

The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them.

A moving magic eye

Haptic and Holistic Strata, Linbury Studio, ROH, London

For long swathes, he stands stationary, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

The Master Storyteller

Almodóvar on Almodóvar, by Pedro Almodóvar and Frederic Strauss (Faber and Faber 2006)

Throughout this collection of interviews, which took place of a series of months, Almodóvar exudes a well balanced streak of eccentricity, coupled with a sense of professionalism that is rooted in formality and devotion to his work. He explains in-depth the many disparate influences which inspired his earliest films, from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to the varied iconography of popular culture.

Young again

Love Song, Lyric Theatre, London

It isn’t only the transformation of this couple’s physical appearance that causes the breath to catch in one’s throat. This switch from sprightly to stumbling is painful enough – but it is the change in the way these two communicate that really impresses.

Struggles with abstraction

Symphony, BBC4

If we subscribe to the belief that the symphony is the ultimate symbol of classical music generally, the highest, purest classical form, it follows pretty quickly that the best of classical music is firmly confined to the past. Pushing so hard to expand the cultural reach of mainstream symphonic tradition is ultimately a deeply conservative thing to do.

Towards ‘interculturalism’?

Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction, by Ali Rattansi (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Democracy, tolerance and equality are ‘core values’ that are frequently cited as the cornerstones of a British way of life, but as Rattansi points out, these values are vague, simplistic and not exclusive to Britain, and - especially historically speaking - have not always acted as the uniting undercurrent of British life.

Naked execution

The Table, Soho Theatre, London

The world behind these frames is exhilaratingly fluid; tiny body parts flutter through the frames, heads jilt about independent of their bodies, clouds sink and feet jiggle. It’s like going to a Magritte exhibition, whilst hideously drunk, and it’s damn good fun.

Snagging on a half-whistle

The Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre, London

McRae doesn’t so much speak the words as dance them, tapping out syllables like expressive footfalls. His voice is a drum kit; it can rasp like a snare or clatter like cymbals or swish like a soft brushstroke. The moment he hits upon the crucial detail – ‘That was it,’ he says – his vocal chords seems to have become corroded by an upsurge of stomach acid.