Monday 28 November 2016

#ReadaPlayaWeek: The Mother

It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.

Week 48: Florian Zeller’s The Mother (2010).

First seen in the UK in 2015 in a translation by Christopher Hampton, The Mother is a companion play to the award winning The Father. I saw The Father at the Birmingham Rep in May after Kenneth Cranham won the Olivier Award for Best Actor for playing Andre, the father of the title who is rapidly losing his mind to dementia. It finds the perfect form to reflect its subject matter, compelling the audience to succumb to the same spiralling confusion as Andre until we are no longer certain which character is which or where they are.

The Mother takes on a familiar form to convey a mother’s loss of self as her son is no longer living at home and her husband may be cheating on her. It sometimes reads that her desperation could also be attributed to Alzheimer’s disease as in The Father but the casting of a younger actress for Anne, the mother, in the Ustinov Bath and Tricycle production (Gina McKee) puts that issue aside and instead places more of an emphasis on the role of a mother. What does it mean, and what is her place once those duties are over, that is, if they do become obsolete?

Scenes play out and then often repeat but with alternate scenarios and endings. The play starts with Pierre about to go off to a seminar in Dijon, but Anne expects he’s having an affair, something which he doesn’t exactly deny to her. Anne is lonely, on pills and depressed. At one moment, she is complaining that their son rarely visits or never calls, thinking that his new girlfriend Elodie is driving him away, but then he comes down for breakfast having seemingly spent the night with them. Later on, Elodie (or The Girl) turns up and stubs her cigarette out on the floor, something which foreshadows a later bit where Anne is suffocated in bed. The play is elliptical and constantly makes you second guess the characters and the nature of reality in the play: is The Girl really Nicholas’ girlfriend or is she a nurse or is she Pierre’s lover?

The Mother is an ultimately poignant play especially when she reflects on missing the days when she made her son breakfast and walked him to school. Her last line, ‘What was all that for?’, certainly strikes a chord but I can’t help but feel it’s a less universal play than The Father. I guess it’s easier to write that as a man but The Mother deals with a different type of loss of self than The Father even though it’s just as (perhaps more so?) nightmarish.

I feel where The Father succeeded more was also more clearly evoking a stronger sense of place which could then be twisted and played with. When I saw James MacDonald’s production, a lot of effort had gone into Miriam Buether’s set to create a definite, concrete and detailed sense of space: three walls, a ceiling, furniture, a peep of the lampshade hanging in the hallway, a glance of the kitchen including a pedal bin in the corner. It gave the effect that we could familiarise ourselves with a flat, in this case belonging to Andre. In a later scene, we are simultaneously in ‘the same room and a different room’. As the scenes go on, more and more furniture moves and eventually vanishes. There were some vases on the bookshelf that I was expecting to switch around which I was keeping an eye on. A few scenes later, I missed that (even if the vases were in the same place) that a painting and lamp had gone! It created a sense of the uncanny, highlighted more by the speed of the changes and the glitches in the classical music between scenes. Space is not as specified in The Mother. In Laurence Boswell’s production at least, it looks as though the whole room was very minimalist and white, perhaps as empty and cold as Anne feels her life has become.


Both plays are very clever even if The Father is more original. There are echoes of Pinter and, inevitably I suppose, Yasmina Reza, and I look forward to seeing more of Zeller’s work.

Friday 25 November 2016

#ReadaPlayaWeek: Verdict

It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.

Week 47: Agatha Christie’s Verdict (1958)

Agatha Christie is, allegedly, the most revived female playwright in history, and I can kind of see why. Her work is untaxing, often set in the well-to-do cosy surroundings of bygone eras, and audiences enter safe in the knowledge that, no matter how grisly the murder, all will be put right by the final curtain. Yet Verdict is somewhat of an odd fish in these regards. Aside from the cover blurb covering the entire plot (which I foolishly read beforehand), the play involves little mystery or intrigue. Less a whodunnit, or even a whydunnit (in the classic Columbo style), we know the culprit and their motive from the off. So this left me wondering exactly how to categorise Verdict

The story involves an eminent Professor, Karl Hendryk, who has emigrated to Britain following a run-in with the government in his homeland (it is never specified where that is). He takes care of his invalid wife, Anya, with the help of her cousin Lisa, with whom Karl has been in love with for years, although they have never acted upon their feelings. Yet Karl is also the object of student, Helen’s, affections, who, jealous and in the belief that she is freeing Karl from an unhappy marriage, kills Anya and covers up the murder as a suicidal overdose of pain medication. What follows is a muddle of false accusations, contradictory behaviour and disappointing resolutions.

There is a nice bit of suspense in Act 2 as we await the verdict of a trial, yet this is quickly dissipated with an anticlimactic revelation that seems very throwaway. The resolution is so neat (albeit with some unnecessary toing and froing in the build-up) that it really stretches the suspension of disbelief, a problem I also had with the stage adaptation of Christie’s And Then There Were None which bordered on laughable in its ludicrous denouement. Even more of a problem is the lack of characterisation. The play is filled with stock characters of a 2D nature – all the familiar tropes are there; the dodgy working-class cleaner; the cold but beautiful woman; the clumsy but well-meaning young man – and because of this there is no real attachment to them, I didn’t care about them. What’s more, often it seems that Christie uses her characters, not as living, breathing people, but as mouthpieces for exposition or some sort of vague social commentary (it is hinted that Karl won’t inform the police of Helen’s crime in the fear that she will hang for it). The dialogue is flimsy at best, and littered with stilted pleasantries; the rounds of ‘how do you do’s?’ on every character’s entrance becomes tiresome fast.


I could read into Verdict some essence of thematic complexity – allusions to assisted suicide and debates over a person’s right to die with dignity, and the aforementioned questioning of capital punishment – yet I feel this would be stretching the play too much and imprinting upon it my own need to analyse everything (a personal fault, I admit). The truth is, Verdict is too flimsy a play to adequately support such intellectual debates. Therefore, taken at face value, it is semi-entertaining, in an ironic I-Can’t-Believe-How-Ridiculous-This-Is way, but if you’re looking for a satisfying Christie mystery thriller, I’d advise sticking to the novels or tv adaptations of Poirot and Marple.

Friday 18 November 2016

#ReadaPlayaWeek: Chicken Soup with Barley

It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.

Week 46: Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1958)

I’m about half way through The Wesker Trilogy (made up of Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking about Jerusalem). Overtly political, and taking a sympathetic and sometimes critical lens to working class lives, they are three of the most famous kitchen sink dramas to come out of the Royal Court Theatre.

To give you an idea of the setup, Chicken Soup with Barley is about the Khan family, a working class, socialist, Jewish family in London. Act one is set in the thirties amidst a time of political urgency. Acts two and three, the former just after WWII and the latter in the fifties, sees that sense of excitement and faith in communism in decline along with the Khan family itself. Furthermore, in mapping the changing dynamics of the Khans and their friends, Wesker chronicles a nation’s drastic changes post-war.

The characters – their dreams, what they stand for, and how that changes – are minutely portrayed. The play opens with Sarah, Jewish and about 37 in the 1936 setting of act one. She’s always seen cooking or making tea and her ‘movements indicate great energy and vitality’ (p.11). Vitality is the cornerstone to this play (and I recommend Dan Rebellato’s analysis on this in 1956 and All That): some characters speak with bundles of passion and Wesker often equates characters having vigour in their personality with their physical well being. Harry’s, Sarah’s husband, impotence as a husband, father, worker and political activist eventually sees him all but give up on life and his body cease up. (On the other hand, the elderly Stann Mann in Roots shows his plentiful energy for life by dying). In the first act, nearly all of the characters are infused with a buzz for the communist revolt in which they are partaking. A revolutionary song plays, the red flag is waved, and they all hold a strong belief in their cause and hope for a changing political society. ‘[S]how a young person what socialism means’, Harry cries to his comrades, ‘and he recognises life! A future!’ (p.31). 

Sarah, too, insists that socialism is about love and brotherhood. Their son Ronnie, 15 in act two when they’ve moved to a block of flats and have recently voted in a Labour government, is also enthusiastic and delivers pamphlets. But things have already begun to change in the play. Ada, their daughter, is beginning to grow cynical of socialism’s practicalities and her father’s real motives. Characters are moving apart and setting up their own businesses in the country or in Manchester. Those passions are diminished even more in the third act even from Ronnie, apart from in Sarah whose passion is no less conveyed (perhaps grasped on to) than in the final moments, maybe not politically but as a mother and wife. Indeed, her closing lines, ‘Please Ronnie, don’t let me finish this life thinking I lived for nothing’, are reminiscent of a not too dissimilar character from Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! (1935, p.77). It’s an emotionally rousing ending to the play. There are times when you think Wesker is patronising or mocking his characters but he precedes the plays by saying that that isn’t his intention, but there’s no denying his sharp observations and the vitality of his dialogue.


Thursday 10 November 2016

#ReadaPlayaWeek: The Riots

It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.

Week 45: Gillian Slovo’s The Riots (2011)

Following the lack of public inquiry into the riots that spread from London throughout the rest of England in the summer of 2011, the Tricycle theatre commissioned its own examination of events. Gillian Slovo’s verbatim piece compiles talking heads from various walks of life; from politicians, policemen and lawyers, to the rioters themselves and the innocent victims of the violent eruption. What was to blame? Race relations? Social divides? A culture of greed and opportunism? Slovo doesn’t come to any definitive conclusion, but to do so would simplify many of the complex and interconnected issues at play in our society.
What does result is an in-depth and wide ranging kaleidoscope of experiences and opinions, beginning with a blow-by-blow account of the riots themselves. Amidst an atmosphere of unrest, the killing of Mark Duggan by the police inspires protests from the black community in Tottenham. Yet, this is merely the breaking point, the spark which fires the ‘powder-keg’ of ongoing ill-relations and mistrust between the community and the police force. We hear accounts of the lack of police action, from both sides – seemingly the force’s hands were tied by low numbers of officers on duty and a fear of violent retaliation from the rioters (many of the policemen interviewed refer to the Broadwater Farm riots where PC Keith Blakelock was killed). For the rioters, this inaction acts more as an insult, and the vandalism and anarchy seems as much a reaction to this as the looting of chain stores was a material repercussion of the capitalist deprivation of the working classes.

From the chaotic memories of the riots, Slovo moves onto a sort of post-mortem interrogation, relaying the hypotheses of numerous authoritarians and supposed voices of reason including Diane Abbott, Iain Duncan Smith and various high court judges. One comment that stood out was Michael Gove’s likening of the situation to a Rorschach blot test, in that people will see what they want to see and thus their existing perceptions will only be further confirmed. Incidentally, Gove then goes on to spout the usual Tory guff about people wanting the reinstating of caning at schools, his example of choice solidifying his status as an out-of-touch, rambling toff. However, his initial point is an interesting one; there is a sense that Slovo is preaching to the converted. While the focus on benefit cuts and the lack of social platforms for poorer communities is an important factor to consider, as this (in the play) is predominantly voiced by the socially mobile, vastly more privileged interviewees, there is an air of left-wing, middle-class soap-boxing. More telling is the view of Sadie King, resident of the Pembury estate, who recalls an environment of white, middle-class moralising when do-gooders arrived to clean up the (already clean) estate; ‘It felt like an invasion, like people not from our community have to come into our community to clean up. It was patronising’.

Slovo hones in on the injustice of scapegoating individuals within the judiciary system. Some people received much harsher sentences than their individual crimes warranted (David Swarbrick received a 2 year sentence for stealing some moisturizer), as a means of setting an example, which is all rather draconian and seems desperately counterproductive. But the resounding voice is that of Mohamed Hammoudan, whose home was torched during the riots. As an innocent victim it is fitting that he gets the final word; he is despondent as he recalls that the emergency services ‘had no plan’ and contemplates having ‘to start a new chapter without having the seeds there from the past’.



Slovo’s play presents an intelligent perspective on the state of Britain, yet doesn’t quite manage to capture the cacophony of anger and disparity felt by the Tottenham community at the centre of the disruption – perhaps due to too much pontificating on the part of the big wigs and MPs. There is an essence of ‘what if…?’ in The Riots, it seemingly unpicks the seams of society to diagnose its problems, yet the truths that hindsight unveils (somewhat paradoxically considering the verbatim genre) don’t seem to have any practical function or resolution in the real world. Five years later not a lot seems to have changed, in fact race and class relations/divisions seem more fractured than ever - just consider the ‘war on immigration’ and instances of overt racism following the Brexit vote. So while it seems Slovo and many of her contributors would like us to take heed of what happened in August 2011 and its repercussions, whether politicians, the police force, and society as a whole will take that on board is another matter…

Friday 4 November 2016

#ReadaPlayaWeek: Dr Korczak's Example

It’s not always possible to see every play. Plays are incomplete on the page but they also have a separate and just as important existence there. This initiative (in its third year) encourages us (and hopefully others) to read more widely. And, as achieved in 2015, we shall try to choose 26 male playwrights and 26 female playwrights for our play choices. The plays from the first half of this year can be seen here.

Week 44: David Greig’s Dr Korczak’s Example (1998)

Set in a Jewish ghetto in occupied Warsaw, Greig’s play, based on real events, focuses on Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. Within the walls of the compound, poverty stricken, surrounded by flies and their deaths in concentration camps awaiting them, Dr Korczak has set up a functioning democracy for the children of the orphanage. They can vote for new children to leave if no one likes them and they can be judged by their own peers in their self-run court. His teachings and theories were enough to get him – and him only – a pardon from the Nazis to be spared death. This, typical of his selfless nature, was refused and he went with the children on the train to his death. But he’s now apparently a legendary figure in Eastern Europe and his ideas formed the basis for the United Nations Rights for Children bill.

New to the orphanage is street urchin Adzio. He’s more used to stealing and fighting for his food, under the impression that he has to play rough in order to survive. Finding it difficult to fit in under the (comparable) Utopia of Korczak’s care, the doctor gets Stephanie to take Adzio under her wing. She teaches him to care and look after others in the orphanage, but in return he encourages her to throw stones at the window of a church whose priest refuses to let the children into the gardens. Sorry for the trouble she may have caused for the orphanage, she can’t help but agree with Adzio’s survivalist ways of thinking. Despite us knowing the horrific history behind how the characters’ stories ended, Greig imbues his characters with a sense of vitality despite the oppression they are suffering from the Nazi soldiers. Korczak teaches his children to live life by example to defy the hatred of the Nazis, allowing for a piece of theatre which is optimistic despite its harrowing backstory.

To avoid being voyeuristic and to allow for a more practical staging, Dr Korczak’s Example stipulates that an alienation effect is employed in order to distance the characters and audience from the action of the play. Actors are actors as well as characters and inanimate dolls represent the children in the orphanage. Dolls from previous scenes can stay on stage to haunt the next scene and actors can interact with them. In the text, it’s perhaps most effective when Korczak is talking to a soldier with a gun (a doll) standing high about the walls guarding the ghetto. Ellipses in the text leave gaps where the soldier’s eerie silence goes, emphasising the inhuman nature of the Nazi gunman.

This play gives Korczak’s story a much deserved showing in front of a UK audience (although it has been given numerous European productions) in a contemporary style which allows the theme of indomitable love to flourish. Furthermore, it also makes us evaluate our thinking on modern education systems, made more interesting in that it was first performed in Scottish schools.