In March, the West End trades the Thames for Parisian shores during
the cleverly named “Londres sur Scène” festival. Over one month,
some of the UK’s most exciting theater companies today strut their
stuff on three stages here, bringing the best of young, hip, brash,
bold, innovative theater made in Cool Britannia. The fest’s organizers
— the Mairie de Paris, the British Council and the Association
Française d’Action Artistique — say it was designed to offer Parisians
“a different approach to theater.” Truer words perhaps were never
spoken. A preview.
“East.” Written and directed by Steven Berkoff
It’s fitting that this festival showcasing new, sometimes abrasive
and abusive, British theater should lead off with the play that,
driven by an unabashed relish for street brawls, scatology and
sex, became a rite of passage for many a student drama club. Reviews
of last year’s revival of “East” in Edinburgh hastened to point out that today’s breed of young
writers may try, but no one as yet talks and acts dirty like Berkoff
did in 1975 when The Times deemed this play, the writer’s first,
“filthy beyond the call of duty.” If mores have evolved since then, so too has the East End which
Berkoff mythologizes (one could now even say eulogizes) in a series
of monologues and vignettes on the condition of the common man
which the author has said evolved out of “a desire to turn a welter
of undirected passion and frustration into a positive form.” The
Eastenders of yesterday, Berkoff included, may have moved out
long ago, but they return here, angry and indignant, their backs
still against the wall.
“Some Explicit Polaroids.” Out of Joint. Written by Mark Ravenhill.
Directed by Max Stafford-Clark
The latest play by 33-year-old Mark Ravenhill could be described
as an example of pop culture with a social conscience. “I think
what I find always intriguing about Mark’s work is that he’s both
seriously engaged in theater as debate yet at the same time he’s
also an effortless populist,” the director Max Stafford-Clark
told me, explaining his, and his company Out of Joint’s, interest
in Britain’s most talked about new writer.
In “Polaroids,” Ravenhill takes a humorously pointed look at the decline of political
and social idealism in post-Thatcher England while touching on
issues of our day, like gay lifestyles, the prohibitive price
of AIDS treatment and Internet dating. The action focuses on Nick, a
die-hard socialist imprisoned 15 years ago for the attempted murder
of an equally uncompromising capitalist, who finds himself back
on the streets in a world all the more dangerous because less
disposed to question itself. The desperate will to be happy of
the people he meets probably could have driven him back to prison,
but instead pushes him into the arms of his ex-lover, Helen, now
a councillor with a mission to improve bus timetables. Does Nick
cop out or does love transcend all? Stafford-Clark said he sees
the play as proposing “two alternatives as a route through life. [...] Relationships or beliefs: what the writer is saying most
people use to get through life.” But the question remains.
A gentler work than Ravenhill’s previous show “Shopping and F***ing,” where graphic acts of sex and violence earned the author critical
notoriety and popular acclaim in England, “Polaroids” nevertheless
doesn’t flinch from portraying the harm that people inflict on
each other in their search for answers. Judging from audience
response however, Ravenhill continues to show that, as tough as
his world is, it’s hitting a nerve with Blairite society.
“Sell Out.” Written by Michael Wynne for Frantic Assembly
When, in Frantic Assembly’s “Sell Out,” a birthday party becomes
the occasion for four friends to batter each other with untold
truths, the emotional punishment is expressed by equally bruising
choreography. Brutally honest dance theater is the trademark of
this company created in 1992 at Swansea University (Wales), and it is earning the troupe kudos in England where their penchant
for urban cool style, searing dialogue, raw physicality and blistering
techno music has won them a massive following of fellow Gen X'ers,
like them in a state of anxiety about relationships and the future.
It comes then as some surprise to learn that founders Vicki Coles, Scott Graham and Steven Hogget have never formally trained in either dance or theater. Hogget
admits the fact with no trace of embarrassment, and rightly so
given the results. “Our influences come mainly from film and pop
videos, more than anything else,” he told me. “We’ve always said
the movement sequences are never really about any kind of aesthetic
quality. It’s always about a sense of energy because that’s what
we’re best at rather than making nice shapes. A lot of it’s quite
rough and quite hard. It’s just about pinpointing the energy of
these people at any one given time.”
Although Frantic’s public is expanding as its success grows, (a
new show, “Hymns,” played the Lyric Hammersmith last fall), there
is no doubt that this is entertainment for the MTV generation. Catering to shrinking attention spans, "Sell Out" is built on
some 20 scenes lasting between one and three minutes. Then there’s
the company’s uncanny ability to communicate with fellow twenty
somethings, sometimes eliciting impromptu commentary from the
audience. Hoggett explained, “There’s always a sense of claustrophobia about our shows, I think, and about, not necessarily the cruelty, but the anxiety
we deal with quite a lot.” He continued, “With ‘'Sell Out’ it was just about the frailty of your perception of your friends
around you and how you just take one thing out of place and everything
else just seems to fall apart around you.” Moving at the breakneck
speed of worlds crumbling, Frantic is being hailed as the company
to take British theater into the new century. Catch them if and
while you can.
“Car.” Theatre Absolute with The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. Written
by Chris O'Connell
After Nick almost kills Gary stealing his Volkswagen Golf, the
battered exec and the desperate boy meet in a mediation session.
But when the right and wrong sides of the track come face to face,
the line between victim and offender blurs...
“Car,” the fast-moving, hard-driving play that last year won both the Edinburgh Fringe First Award and
the Time Out Best New Play on the London Fringe, puts on stage
the “world of extremity” that is the preferred domain of the author,
37-year-old Chris O'Connell. As socially alienated as Nick is,
Gary, in his rage and contempt, is on the verge of becoming an
equally dangerous menace. Having spent two years working for the
West Midlands Probation Service, the writer knows what he is talking
about. “We’re all complex,” O’Connell explained, “No one is just a car thief; they’re always something else as
well. [‘Car’] is as much about the offender as the victim.”
Indeed, audience sympathies frequently switch, turned around by
the play’s one-two punch of, on the one hand, a high-octane physicality
that underlines Nick’s irreverence for social convention and,
on the other, a lyrical (albeit in-your-face) language written, said the author, to show “that underneath these characters is
a sort of poetry, an intelligence or an intellect that’s been
wasted.”
With awards and commissions from both radio and TV since “Car,”
O’Connell is now relying more on his pen than his probation work
to call for collective soul-searching. “Car” is in many ways the
author’s attempt to answer for himself the question: what are
“good” and “bad” and can they meet and heal their differences?
One thing’s for sure: “You have to create a dialogue,” O’Connell
said. “If those two sides can’t come together, then what you end
up with is what’s outside the mediation room, which is anarchy.”
“The Kaos Importance of Being Earnest.” Directed by Xavier Leret
This irreverent production of Oscar Wilde at his wittiest takes a lunging stab at last century’s drawing
room manners. Kaos Theatre throws the masks off and the gauntlet
down, setting the action in New Labour Britain, giving Lady Bracknell
a coke habit, Miss Prism hormones she never knew existed, and everyone outrageous get-ups. For
its camp aesthetic and treatment of a text generally considered
hard to improve upon, the show has been called “a Warner Brothers
cartoon on acid” and “a dramatic tour de force.”
“Living Like Victor.” Written by Shon Dale-Jones. Directed by
Shon Dale-Jones and Stefanie Muller
The six-year-old fringe company Hoipolloi has won rave reviews with this fantastical, madcap whodunit in
which three actors disguise themselves as detectives to investigate
the murder of a fictional character but get trapped in their own
never-ending play. An ingenious comic romp from this improv troupe
heavily influenced by the teachings of Jacques Lecoq.
Practical “Londres sur Scène”
In addition to these six shows in VO, the festival includes “Made in Britain 2,” a series of play readings in French (‘Après Darwin” by Timberlake
Wertenbaker, “Poupée Brûlée” by Chris Hannan and “Blue Heart”
and “Cloud Nine” by Caryl Churchill), and a French production
of “La Terrible Voix de Satan” by Gregory Motton. Prices: 100F/80F/50F.
Carte Pass: 100F (provides 50F admission to seven shows). Readings
free.Tickets available at theaters and FNAC.
o Théâtre Sylvia Monfort, (all shows Tue-Sat, 8:30pm, Sat 4pm),106, rue Brancion, 15e, M°
Porte de Vanves, tel: 01.56.08.33.88, “East,” Mar 7-11, “The Kaos
Importance of Being Earnest” Mar 14-18, “Sell Out,” Mar 21-25,
“Some Explicit Polaroids,” Mar 28 to Apr 1
o Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, 21 bd Jourdan, 14e, RER B: Cité Universitaire, tel: 01.43.13.50.50,
“Made in Britain 2,” Mar 13-14, “Car,” Mar 18-20, Sat-Mon, 8:30pm,
Sun, 5:30pm
o Théâtre Paris-Villette. (all shows Tue, Thu-Fri, 9pm, Wed, Sat, 7:30pm), 211, av Jean-Jaurès,
19e, M° Porte de Pantin, tel: 01.42.02.02.68, “La Terrible Voix
de Satan,” to Mar 25, “Living Like Victor,” Apr 4-8.
