Encore Theatre Magazine

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

2007-02-13T13:21:00.000Z

Change of Address

We're on the move - please update your bookmarks to http://www.encoretheatremagazine.co.uk/

Blogger's reduced its functionality; we got bored of the look; a friend showed us how to get our own domain name; and we decided wanna go posh.

We'll bring over all the content over the next few months, but from TODAY this site is no longer functional and Encore is now master of its domain...

Racist Culture

2007-01-21T23:43:00.000Z

Racist Culture

The year’s barely three weeks old and our culture’s been rocked by racism from top to bottom. From the hallowed heights of the ballet came the uncomfortable revelation that Simone Clark, principal dancer at the English National Ballet, has joined the far-right British National Party; soon followed the spectacle of Celebrity Big brother, in which Jade Goody (pictured), aided and abetted by her boyfriend Jack Tweed, model Danielle Lloyd, and ex-S Club member, Jo O’Meara, connived in the racist bullying of Bollywood star, Shilpa Shetty.

The BNP have tried to exploit this new addition to their ranks which led to the bizarre spectacle of 30 racists fighting for the right to go the ballet past a group of 50 anti-racist protestors. The left in the meantime has been up in arms about the affair. A similarly surreal non-event greeted Jade Goody when she was overwhelmingly voted out of the Big Brother house with 82% wanting her out. Fearing violent scenes, Channel 4 decided to hold a public eviction, so Jade bathetically tottered out to be met by Devina McColl (who, deprived of her audience and unsure how to play it, did her best to look both excited and grave at the same time).

It’s a weird situation when the tabloids, who have so often whipped up racist fears about immigrants and asylum seekers, sitting astride their very highest horse over loudmouth Jade. The Mail for example published a very sympathetic interview with Shetty’s parents, bemoaning ‘the poisonous atmosphere of the Big Brother house’ and the horrifying ‘reality of modern Britain’. In an interview with Simone Clarke, on the other hand, the same paper, after some cursory criticisms of the BNP (mainly about how uncouth they are), all but endorsed her decision to join. Her reasons for joining ‘cannot be brushed aside as a foolish error, let alone ignored’ and indeed her worries about immigration reveal not her own ignorance and prejudice but ‘that something has gone badly wrong with democratic British politics’. Because, they insist ‘crime and immigration are real and understandable fears’ (how did ‘crime’ get in here?) and indeed ‘immigrants are arriving in Britain and the rate of one a minute’.

In both instances, the arguments reveal our confusion as a culture about racism. While Clarke (pictured) is obviously fantastically naive and, frankly, a bit thick if she didn’t know that the BNP are holocaust-deniers, favour forcible repatriation, and various other policies she doesn’t believe in, it’s also disturbing to see how ignorant and demagogic the arguments have been against her and Jade Goody.

For one thing, does it matter what the private opinions are of a ballet dancer? The sad fact about the ballet world is that these men and women are trained from a very early age precisely not to express themselves, to evacuate their creativity, to become machine-like and merely to to execute - perfectly and beautifully - the steps assigned to them by the choreographer. In fact, they merely obey orders. (The perfect follower of fascism, in fact.) The idea that Clarke will be given a platform to express her racist views on the stage of the Colisseum is absurd. You don’t become principal dancer of a national ballet company by using the stage as a platform to express yourself. She only got a platform in the press because she was exposed. There is little evidence that she intended to make a public stand at all. And if it’s a legal political party - ah but that’s another debate - why can’t she join it? Is joining the BNP a notifiable act? If not, then we shouldn’t really have found out. It annoyed me to read that Peter Hall and Harold Pinter voted Tory in 1979. It doesn’t make me respect Frank Lampard very much to know that he supports David Cameron. But, hey, I don’t go to the theatre just to see myself on stage, I go to encounter other people, different people, to extend the limits of my experience and so of myself.

Which leads us directly to Big Brother. In 1978, Germaine Greer wrote ‘Eternal War’, a brilliant article about August Strindberg. One might have imagined that Greer, the most famous feminist of the twentieth century might have little positive to say about the most famous misogynist in theatre history. But the article is a eulogy. Some men, she says, claim to be feminists, to understand what women want; they are soft, and caring, in touch with their feminine side. Bollocks to that, says Greer. This is just the co-option of feminism and nothing has changed underneath. Strindberg is the greatest playwright about the battle of the sexes because, she argues scarily, he is the only playwright who genuinely reveals what men really think about women. Implicit in the article is the belief that it’s better to face the horror of the world than to hide it.

And if this is true, and we think it is, what’s wrong with Celebrity Big Brother? What that programme revealed starkly and clearly was what racism is like. We saw - as David Eldridge has pointed out - the way that racism intersects with class envy and class hatred; we saw the way it expresses itself in crude paranoid fantasies (the housemates unbelievably believe that Shilpa Shetty is trying to poison them), its coded expression in sexist language (Shilpa has been called a ‘dog’ and a ‘cunt’), and the casual, ambiguous joking that can terrorise without exposing itself (’What’s her name? Shilpa Poppadom?’ quipped Jade; ‘I think she should fuck off home’ opined Danielle).

Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, has demanded that Channel 4 admit that it mishandled the situation and called for its chairman, Luke Johnson, to be censured. It’s true that the episode has revealed some murky things about the relationship between TV programmes and the big celebrity agents but this isn’t what Trevor Phillips is talking about. So why censure C4? Because it showed racism? Because it brought some nasty people together and showed the result? Racism is a feature of current Britain. This sort of attitude is about two things (a) making you feel better about your own latent prejudices by identifying someone more racist than yourself, (b) a belief that if you ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening, racism will go away. The first is dishonest; it suggests that London Theatre Blog may be right when it claims that under the radical protest lies a rather more conservative view that everything’s really alright; the second claim is not true and has never been true.

If you believe that racism thrives in the oxygen of publicity - and perhaps it would - would it not be better to ask what there is in our atmosphere that could give life to such a hateful belief? Otherwise it’s like locking up teenage junkies for possession without stopping to ask why they are taking smack in the first place. Oh, hold on, we do that.

The media and the performing arts are venues in which we can ask questions about the sources of human hatred, the forms of our ignorance, how we become the worst of ourselves. And the thread that runs through both of these unpleasant episodes is not so much race as class. Why is it so horrifying that Simone Clarke’s a neo-Nazi? Because she’s a ballet dancer. She’s in contact with high art, she’s probably middle class, she’s one of us… which is why it’s expressed as puzzlement, shock, confusion. Whereas Jade, the unacceptable face of the white working class, is a repository for the bourgeoisie’s hatreds and fears. Usually middle class liberal can’t admit that he or she is disgusted and terrified by the working class, so moments like this represent rare relief. Thank God she’s said something racist, and to such an emblem of cosmopolitan middle-class refinement, because now we can happily hate her and all of her chav scum kind!

It’s nastily ironic that what we saw here was a lynch-mob mentality. And if you believe, with Encore, that racism feeds on irrationalism and ignorance, that the arts are at their best when they are fearlessly imagining the worst and the best that we can be, this has been a bad week for all of us.

Jack Bradley

2007-01-17T19:27:00.000Z

Jack Bradley

A kind friend forwarded Jack's email announcing the sad news of his retirement from the post of Literary Manager of the National Theatre.

After twelve very happy years at the National pontificating about playwriting, offering unwanted and sometimes unwarranted advice, I’ve decided to stop telling people how to write plays and I’m going to try and write some more of my own. Whether or not this will be for the greater good of Dramatic Literature, I suspect this humbling next step will be very good for my soul, not to mention the hapless victims of my more wayward views. All I can say is that I feel I have been privileged to read and learn from the work of my friends and peers. I believe the last decade will be remembered as a halcyon time. Not since the turn of the 16^th Century has the South Bank and London Theatre seen such an explosion of talent. Long may it continue and I’ll see you in a theatre foyer soon!

Jack has been one of the major positives of the last decade. In fact since 1994, he's nurtured countless playwrights, whether by offering them commissions, reading their work, meeting them, passing their plays to other theatres, getting them into the building, pairing them up with directors and actors. The National's always been a bit of a director's theatre, certainly after Olivier's departure. It's never been a writer's theatre; when it's tried to be, as in the mid-eighties, it's usually just succeeded in turning writers into directors. But the National has championed many important new writers in the last decade - Moira Buffini, Patrick Marber, Gregory Burke, Mark Ravenhill, Owen McCafferty, Shelagh Stevenson, Joe Penhall, David Eldridge, Nick Darke, Nick Dear, Samuel Adamson, Roy Williams, Conor McPherson, Simon Stephens, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Martin McDonagh, Gary Owen, Tanika Gupta, and many others - and most of them were seen on the National's stages directly or indirectly because of Jack's influence. The National has been much more of a writer's theatre during Jack's time. He reads a lot, goes to see new work a lot, and is very approachable. He likes a wide range of stuff, from Crimp to J T Rogers, from Stephens to Dear. He's been good news and Encore contemplates the future of the National's literary department with some anxiety.

Fortunately he's going back to playwriting. He rather nobly suspended his playwriting when he took on the literary manager role, believing that he couldn't really be critiquing other people's work when he was focused on his own. We wish him good luck.

Now. Who's your top tip to take over?

Happy Days Are Here Again

2007-01-12T23:46:00.000Z

Happy Days Are Here Again

Back in the early 1990s, Deborah Warner decided to have a fresh look at Footfalls. She and Fiona Shaw (both pictured), reconceived the play, usually performed in a thin strip of light, around the auditorium of the dark Garrick Theatre, the voices coming at us from strange angles and we sat backwards on the old theatre seats and heard this curious theatre ghost haunting the old spaces. The Beckett Estate were outraged. It is, admittedly, annoying for writers when directors treat stage directions as ignorable but Beckett's work is often enough revived in faithful, even reverential productions (viz. the recent Gate Beckett festival), that a bit of theatrical reinvention would seem like a good idea. Indeed, if his work is to survive, one might think exploring its edges and folds and corners essential. But the Estate did not think so and banned Deborah Warner from ever getting another crack at Sam's Holy work.

But they've clearly kissed and made up. The Beckett Estate had become, largely because of that incident (though there have been others), a by-word for authorial tyranny, and Deborah Warner has hardly been damaged by the controversy. So Warner and Shaw are back in favour again and have been given permission to do Beckett's Happy Days. In return, one imagines, this won't be a total reinvention of the play, so all sides will be, more or less, happy.

The National seem oddly keen that you see it and have sent us two offers to pass on to you. We told them what a lot of ruffians and philistines you were but they wouldn't listen. So: if you are a student then you can see the play for a fiver and they throw in a bottle of Corona. The wedge of lime costs £35 though. (Only joking about the lime.) If you're sadly not a student, but you're a friend of Beckett you can still get in for £15. Not a personal friend, I presume. Just, you know, someone who likes Beckett. Not that you have to prove that. You don't have to recite Not I or anything to get the cheap ticket. Details of how to claim are below. Students to the left, friends to the right. Click on the thumbnails to bring them up full size.

We're guessing that if you mention that you came across this offer on Encore Theatre Magazine, they might do this again, so dropping our name can't hurt us or you.

Let's just hope it's good.

Anonymity or Cowardice?

2007-01-12T16:23:00.000Z

Anonymity or Cowardice?

David Eldridge (pictured, with Marla Rubin) has recently been the subject of a bruising encounter on the blogosphere. Not his own very wonderful blog but on Fin Kennedy’s (also very wonderful) site. An anonymous contributor made some very aggressive and personal remarks which David responded to in a characteristically forthright and pugnacious tone. This escalated until Fin was forced to suspend comments on the site. For a while, it seems, David contemplated giving up his blog.

This set us thinking at Encore because anonymity is part of the problem. Most people are ruder about others behind their backs than they would be to their faces. If they are sure it won’t get back to them, they are ruder still. Internet comment-posting allows complete anonymity and some people have taken the opportunity it affords to be very rude to people, like David, who stick their neck out and write about themselves online.

Of course, so do we. Encore has been very rude about certain people in the past. We doubt that Sheridan Morley or Toby Young or Sir David Hare are fans of our site. In a couple of weeks we think it likely that Quentin Letts will go right off us. We are also anonymous and this latest flare-up has made us ask again about the value of anonymity and examine our motives.

We have always maintained anonymity because we want to be able to criticise institutions we may work in and people we may work with. We also want to praise these institutions and people without it looking like social climbing. If the objects of our praise don’t know who we are, we can’t benefit, which is important. Our independence is important to us. Theatre companies have written to us wondering if we could write about some show of theirs. We always say we might do but we won’t ever promise a puff-piece. Anonymity allows us to maintain that independence without consequence.

Glyn Cannon, or someone pretending to be Glyn Cannon, once argued, very interestingly, that without authorship, comments have no authority. As we said at the time:

It depends on the judgment; if I announce that Michael Frayn has a headache, the
value of that claim is devalued unless I am Michael Frayn. But if I announce
that Michael Frayn earned £2m last year and draw your attention to his public
accounts, does it matter to the judgement who I am? You might start wondering
why someone would want to reveal Frayn's financial situation. But you might also
wonder that if I named myself.

We also feel passionately that ideas and debates don’t always have to be dragged down into interpersonal rivalry. As David Eldridge has put on his blog recently, responding to us,

I thoroughly loathe the inane modern certainties [...] that any action must be
motivated by reasons of ego, selfishness, emotional-indulgence or materialistic
gain and perceive them as such.

We hope ideas can be appreciated in themselves and we don’t hope to gain personally from any of this. In fact, writing for this blog takes up time that probably should be spent on other things.

What ‘Anonymous’ said about David on Fin’s blog was personal and irrelevant to artistic judgment and that's the difference. Maybe we’ve stepped over the line once or twice. We did mock Sheridan Morley’s beard a couple of times, which is probably not really at the heart of what is so objectionable about the old buffoon. But looking back over the various things we've written, we feel fairly happy that what we've written may have been written very savagely (and, no, we wouldn't enjoy reading such things about ourselves) but they are also usually argued.

Also - and does this need saying? - this is all the product of love. In the theatre, we ironclad ourselves against disappointment and failure, and from the horror and sadness that these rich and intense and joyful experiences pass and are over, the cast scattering to other shows, the sets dismantled, the attention dwindling, the show fading into the monchrome of distant memory. We harden our hearts and talk about making work, having a job, getting a gig, to disguise from ourselves the terrible joy of all this. If we didn't care about this work and - whisper it softly - deep down genuinely believe that the experiences that we make and witness are among the most important and profound experiences in our lives, we would not express our criticisms with such passion. So we are inclined to maintain our anonymity, risk crossing the line, and continue to honour and denounce with all the force at our disposal.

Fortunately for the blogosphere, David Eldridge seems to have been persuaded to continue with his blog. So we can continue to follow the fortunes of his writing career, West Ham, and, of course, his dog. And hopefully soon we will find out what was in the letter he received before Christmas that made him weep tears of joy.

Billington's Blair

2007-01-10T02:13:00.000Z

Billington's Blair

Michael Billington's put up a more than usually will-this-do?-ish piece on the Guardian's theatre blog. Titled, for no very good reason, 'How do you solve a problem like Blair?' he uses the announcements of two 'Tony Blair on Trial' plays, one on C4 and one at the Tricycle, to observe that Blair so far 'has been seen on stage largely as a buffoon'. Instead, Michael longs for a play that 'takes Blair seriously'.

Well, there is something to be said for this point. The kind of lampooning you get in The Madness of George Dubya or Follow My Leader makes those of us who opposed the Iraq occupation feel good but it doesn't add to our understanding. Nor, one might add, were they really meant to.

But what does Billington mean by taking Blair seriously? He offers two definitions: one 'that examines Blair in all his psychological complexity' or 'one that even portrays him as a tragic figure'. What does this mean? Here Billington pads the article out with some very meandering thoughts but he seems to believe that Blair's tragedy is that he did the wrong thing for the right reasons, at least in his own eyes. By 'the wrong thing' he means enter into this murderous war (is that what he means by the reference to 'the accumulating corpses'? It was a war, Michael...). But it's utterly mysterious what he could mean by 'the right reasons'.

Why did we go to war? Blair is fond now of claiming that he did so in order to depose the tyrant, Saddam Hussein. But this is a rereading of history. Blair took us into war on the basis of the WMD Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed and was seeking to develop. There is much l;ess talk about his oppression of his own people. If you look at the two main dossiers of information released to the press and public, the February ('dodgy') dossier and the September dossier, the great preponderance and primary focus of both is on the WMD intelligence. In the February dossier, only three pages directly refer to the oppression of the Iraqi people; the long second section outlining the structure of the internal security apparatus seems largely informative and as much talking about, say, the role of the Republican Guard in defeating the weapons inspectors as in discussing the security's role in repressing dissidence. In the September dossier, the one directly made available to the public, Blair's introduction comprises 29 sentences, 15 of which relate directly to the threat posed by the WMD. In contrast, there is one reference to Saddam Hussein's 'dictatorial' behaviour. It is clear that it was the imminent threat to Britain posed by Saddam Hussein, not that of his own people, that was Blair's central argument in support of military action.

This makes a difference because the kinds of questions you ask someone claiming self-defence (even anticipatory self-defence) are quite different from those claiming humanitarian intervention. If Iraq had posed a direct threat to the West, we would have been quite right to intervene militarily - once diplomatic routes had broken down. Few other questions would have been asked. If we had claimed it was a humanitarian intervention, other questions come into the picture: why now? (the September dossier lists human rights abuses going back twenty years) and why Iraq? (rather than, say, Zimbabwe, or North Korea, or any one of several oppressive regimes). By claiming the first ground, he avoids the second set of questions, and so he cannot change position now. It is a central plank of any 'just war' that you declare, beforehand, why you are embarking upon it. This Blair did not do.

So if Billington means that for the right reasons (deposing Saddam Hussein) Blair did the wrong thing (went to war), he's seriously misled. And in any case, why would this be illuminated by presenting a rounded pictrure of Blair in all his psychological complexity? Answer: it wouldn't. It would be a distraction from the real forces that are at work here, and these are not psychological. They are an embedded Foreign Office doctrine that will not let us break with America, in a mistaken belief that we hold a balance of forces between the US, Europe and the Commonwealth. They are an ideological programme called Project for the New American Century. It's our addiction to air travel, America's addiction to fuck-off cars, the emerging economies of China and India, and the need to stabilise the diminishing oil supply because the US presidency is bought by the oil companies.

Yes, I think there is some kind of tragic story here. Blair over-reached himself in believing that he could persuade the UN to get behind military action in Iraq. But he couldn't, because they didn't believe he had them, didn't really think he was obstructing the weapons inspectors, and saw the American aggression for what it was. Naked self-interest, a neo-neo strategy, the revival of Kissingerism, and that was never going to be good for the world. But to claim that his story is the one we need to see is to buy into Blair's own self-importance and a UK foreign office view of the world.

To understand what has happened in Iraq, we must resist Blair: The Tragedy.

Encore Review of the Year 2006

2006-12-31T15:48:00.000Z

Encore Review of the Year 2006

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with their suggestions for plays, productions, and theatre work in general that deserved recognition in 2006. This was an interesting year for the theatre with some of the most interesting new plays for a while, almost (dare we trendspot?) looking like a pattern, some radical new work at some very mainstream venues. It was also a pretty bad year for the critics who overruled their linesmen to ignore offsides, award penalties where there were none, and showed evidence bias to the home side.

The plays that caught Encore's eye this year took some brave risks with form. What was truly depressing about the critical response to Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? (title of the year, by the way) was the way that most critics, whether they liked it or not, discussed the play as if it were a simple broadside against US foreign policy and the moral compromises that underpinned the 'special relationship' with Britain. That is the description of a newspaper article, not a play, particularly not a play which squeezed this story through a domestic relationship, told it through shards of incomplete dialogue fragments, depicted it (in James Macdonald's beautiful production) in a light-bulb-framed showbiz-mirror, wherein we (and the Public Theatre audience to come) see ourselves and the darkness around us. We don't yet feel we have understood or properly felt the force of those formal devices and this is a play that will haunt Encore's imagination for some time to come. Ravenhill's bold two steps into new ground, The Cut and pool (no water) were treated very roughly by the theatre critics, though the latter play fared better with the more adventurous dance and performance art reviewers who are evidently better attuned to what new theatre is than the content-spotting first-stringers. Both texts were major achievements by one of our major writers and the critics really need to catch up. Simon Stephens dropped his trademark gentleness by showing us, in Motortown (pictured), Britain through the hellish eyes of a returning soldier and in doing so allowed us to imagine ourselves as others see us; the sociological accuracy of the play is far less significant that the political and ethical importance of such an act of fearless imagination, in these times of all times. Anthony Neilson's Realism at the Edinburgh International Festival did not perhaps have the weight and force of Dissocia (finally coming to the Court, thank you Dominic Cooke), but showed further evidence of the vigorous, restless talent of this writer and the creative ensemble he has gathered around him. It was hard to watch Catch without spotting the lurching changes of style, but principally because we all knew it was cowritten. The subject was fascinating and resonant, Kathryn Drysdale as the precocious girl on work experience was a great discovery, but the play didn't seem to amount ot very much, and some of its plotting was shaky (why does Claire tell her fuck-buddy it's her on the video? why keep the bloody database on a chain round her neck, rather than, say, in a safe? At least put a bloody password on it...). Elsewhere at the Court there was less to be excited about. The Winterling was entertaining but a rushed first draft. Rainbow Kiss showed promise more than achievement. Sugar Mummies, O Go My Man, and Piano/Forte were stinkers, unfortunately. Rock 'n' Roll we have already covered extensively.

Blackbird got to London this year in a stupid production with immeasurably coarsened performances; that the play's daring and beauty still came across is a tribute to the hidden robustness of this delicate and evanescent work. The Seafarer on the other hand had a sublime production that more or less entirely hid the silliness of the play. But why discount acting? This was some of the best around. The same might be said of Black Watch; a great evening, but in its toying with verbatim form it seemed gorged on having its cake and eating it. 2006 was a great year for Peter Morgan with superb drama-docs on TV (Longford), film (The Queen), and stage (Frost/Nixon), the latter making a wholly deserved push into the West End, one of the few decent shows there all year. Brenton's In Extremis was a more certain return to the stage than Paul, with more blood and spunk in the intellectual sinews. The Bush did not set Encore alight this year, even Steve Thompson's much-praised Whipping it Up seeming too boxed in by its narrative conventionalities. David Hare's new one, The Vertical Hour, opened on Broadway to mixed reviews - mainly at the expense of Julianne Moore - but in its pitting of British anti-war cynicism against American pro-war idealism, Hare seems to have hit upon an elegant structure to dramatise and complicate its audience's likely preconceptions. The play that excited us the most this year was probably Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, a full audit of the way we live and finding us morally bankrupt. The beautiful, spare, sympathetic production by Matthew Dunster (when are you going to write us another play, by the way?) was a perfect vehicle for Kelly's flinty, hilarious, edgy dialogue, his deep sense of moral decay, and the horror of how we are to each other. We hope, and if we prayed we'd pray, that this play will demonstrate to the critics that we don't have to be literal to write keenly and alertly about the world.

There were some excellent revivals this year. London finally saw Zerbombt (pictured), Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, a masterpiece of subtle observation, real time aesthetics, and then a spectacular and gorgeous transformation into another world, a world of light and emptiness, the kind of death-world into which the characters at the end of Crave gratefully fall. It was a good year for Blasted, with a terrific touring revival by Graeae (pictured) in the early part of the year, about to begin a deserved London residency at the Soho. The Voysey Inheritance, under Peter Gill's direction, was a spectacular redicovery for those of us who not already made it. The opening, with its Crimp-like interrupted dialogue, was stunning enough, but then one could only watch in horrified admiration through Granville Barker's remorseless eye fixed open on the beast that erupts within us when money enters our mutual relations. The Orange Tree's The Madras House was similarly admirable. Dominic Cooke's RSC Crucible was as good as this very over-rated play could ever get, unfussy, needle-sharp, and urgent. Encore hears good things about the RSC Complete Works season, though only saw the Indian Dream, which it faintly admired. Cheek by Jowl's The Changeling was oustanding at the Barbican . Moon for the Misbegotten was unbelievably, staggeringly dull, utterly without pertinence, resonance, or interest. The set, however, was very pretty with a rich blue in the surrounding cyc that suggests a new process. We must look into that. Cabaret was idiotic; Rufus Norris, brilliant though he is, has made a tit of himself by trying to bring out the politics of this musical: that Cabaret is actually about the rise of German fascism. Oh, you think? It is worrying that this must have been, at some point, a revelation to Norris himself. The crass evocations of Nazi thuggery and a particularly egregious Auschwitz routine were grandly patronising tautologies. The sixth-form moment where a humourless Nazi pushes over some concrete Kabarett letters actually inspired giggles around us. Other damp squibs included The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Tom and Viv, the ETT Mother Courage and the Sheffield Caretaker.

There were some wonderful romps this year. See How They Run was note-perfect, a great reminder that farce, when it is done properly, is unique and sublime. The Chichester Nicholas Nickleby was romptastic, but more, it reminded us of an era of grand, generous, ambitious socialist playmaking and the final moments where the boy is rescued from the snow would stir any left-wing heart. The Life of Galileo was nothing to do with Brecht, but hell it's a good story and if you hire David Hare what are you going to get? Apart from the deeply embarrassing second-half opener (urban decadence created by people who take taxis to work), it was a good and vivid story. Patrick Barlow's retread of The 39 Steps is much funnier than the dour publicity leads you to expect. Dick Whittington was new and old at the same time and set a good tone for what will hopefully be an annual event at the Barbican.

Therese Raquin was kind of a revival, kind of a new adaptation, and for us entirely failed. The set was totally misconceived; the room is supposed to be cramped with material from the shop - the 'dull compulsion of the economic' defining and distorting the bourgeois marriage. That really kinda is the point, isn't it? Instead we got the cavernous mansion-like upstairs quarters of the Raquins and the pressure wasn't there. The attempt to make the relationship really sexy was intermittent and it takes more than passionate clinches to make us believe that two people would kill for love. Mostly one flinched at the embarassment of someone trying to hard to emulate Katie Mitchell - her favourite designer, her favourite lighting designer, her favourite leading man, a gratuitous movement sequence - when the latter would never have allowed the horrible stageyness of Grivet and Michaud, the psychological flimsiness, the sense that people were acting the way they were because that's how we do things on stage, rather than in life. We saw quite the opposite in Mitchell's own astonishing reinvention of The Seagull which got the critics' knickers in a right twist for its supposed vandalising of the text. Sadly the critics don't know their Chekhov well enough, despite having had a chance to shoot down at least five seagulls in the last few years; this was a wholly faithful rediscovery of the play, given the awkward and slightly juvenile work that it can seem in some hands, this was a rich, mature and deeply serious work, stripped of its accumulated archaisms, coming up fresh and clean and achingly true, this was one of the great highlights of Encore's year.

New and experimental performance work was thin on the ground for us. The most exciting single performance we saw was a strange, adolescent, scurrilous and immature piece called Hitler Wrote 20 Pop Songs... Have You Heard Them? (pictured) by a theatre company with the unlovely name Theatre de Cunt. A savage political satire of a kind we have to call politically incorrect, though actually just seemed fearless. None of the pieties that throttle political discourse were observed here; the show was shapeless and overlong, the jokes were uneven, the suggestion that Tony Blair is somehow secretly in league with Adolf Hitler is absurd, but the show had energy and an iconoclastic joy that swept aside these criticisms. Punchdrunk's Faust was well realised but perhaps a bit overextended. Duckie's The Class Club was a strange event; was it really an exposé of class or just a reinforcement of it? Having wider seats in first class train compartments or the tiered pricing in most West End theatres would seem to expose and comment on class just as well. Though perhaps less enjoyably. Richard Maxwell's company had a welcome return to BITE with The End of Reality, adding stiffly awkward fighting to their repertoire of estrangement. Robert Lepage's The Andersen Project was breathtaking and full of heart as well as profound cleverness. The strangest evening of the year, as well as one of the best, was Katie Mitchell's Waves - strange only because it was so odd to see something so daring and experimental on a National Theatre stage, with a National Theatre kind of budget. This was one of the most beautiful experiences of the year.

The performers who most stood out this year were young. We've mentioned Kathryn Drysdale in Catch, and the same show's Niamh Webb had a fiery intensity as the conscience-stricken fury. Pippa Bennett-Warner was a stunning revelation in the National's Caroline or Change claiming the stage with wit and verve like an experienced Broadway hoofer though the programme notes only that she's just finished her A-Levels. The great breakthrough was probably Daniel Mays in The Winterling and Motortown, playing a pair of British misfits. The first, Patsy, a city boy lost in the country, was a strutting Pete Doherty, all flash cash, mouth and skank. The second, Danny, was a hollow-souled Iraq veteran, sickened by the moral emptiness of the country he returns to. This was an awkward and defiantly unshapely play and it was given its moral authority by Daniel Mays's haunting performance.

The great arrival of the year was the National Theatre of Scotland, which despite one or two stumbles, has planted its standard on the firmament of Scottish theatre, and, by turning down Hytner's appeal for Black Watch, has demonstrated a lively independence of spirit. Its misses (Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, The Crucible) have been more than made up for by its hits (Black Watch, Gobbo (pictured), Realism, Roam, Home). It has pushed theatre right to the forefront of the culture and in England we can only watch its creativity and imagination with envious eyes. The Young Vic returned in style, with a gorgeous new building and great bar to hang out in. We said hello to Dominic Dromgoole at the Globe, who has made some impact, and wrote one of the most bizarre books of the year. We said goodbye to August Wilson, Clive Perry, Paul Ableman, Tom Bell, Julian Slade, Benno Besson, Mary O'Malley, Maureen Stapleton, Moira Shearer and David Halliwell. We also seem likely to lose the Theatre Museum.

Nothing changed decisively in 2006 though there are signs perhaps that the vogue for verbatim is waning, that we are regaining confidence in using theatrical form, and not just content, to express our political engagement and ask our political questions. We saw a greater confidence with making connections between dance and theatre, art and theatre, radio and theatre, performance art and theatre. The writing was bold and imaginative as ever; it felt as though we have begun to find our way to take the temperature of the 21st century in the shape and texture of our theatre nights.

That was Encore's 2006. And look, we even said something nice about David Hare. We're having a facelift in 2007 but obviously we'll keep you all informed. In the meantime, why don't you tell us about your 2006?

Christmas Comes Early

2006-12-08T00:51:00.000Z

Christmas Comes Early

Toby Young - arse, philistine and talent-free dramatist - is ending his foray into theatre criticism. Such as it was. Young is apparently going to spend more time at home in the evenings - his wife is expecting a third baby - though Encore can reveal that the real reason is injured pride. The crown of Worst Critic of the Century, an honour for which Young has fought so valiantly, has been decisively snatched by Quentin Letts. Young has plainly realised that, philistine halfwit though he is, he never stood a chance of getting his pole position back while Letts was on the grid.

Surprise Surfuckingprise

2006-11-29T12:47:00.000Z

Surprise Surfuckingprise

Yes, the Evening Standard new play award went to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll. It's a terrible mess of a play - hell, it's not even a good Stoppard play; and why did Motortown and The Cut not even get nominated? Of course everyone - yes yes yes - is entitled to their own opinion. Maybe the panel just didn't like it. But there are patterns here.

Slightly less incredibly, Nina Raine won best newcomer for Rabbit, which was okay, part of a miniature contemporary genre of plays by women trying to revive and rework the bourgeois drawing room comedy (think Moira Buffini's Dinner, Charlotte Jones's The Lightning Play). Raine's play is nicely waspish and the repulsiveness of the characters is balanced by the force of the revelations.

But Stoppard, for fuck's sake? There is a real problem with our critics. Encore senses a change in the air, the feeble literalism of much of what has passed for political theatre in the last few years seems to be in retreat. Playwrights are using metaphor and aesthetic disruption not as evasion of contemporary realities but as a recognition that the nature of contemporary reality needs new forms, new experiences, new structures and plays. But the critics, almost uniformly, beg to differ. They prefer clarity of content, inconspicuity of form. And their vengeance against plays that break their rules. We've alredy mentioned the reviews of The Cut; the same happened to pool (no water); look at the response to Waves ('the production is a sterile piece of theatre about theatre' - Billington), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? ('This is far too fancy to succeed as a political play' - Clapp), and there are many more examples. If it engages in dialogue with theatre rather than just in dialogue with the world, they hate it. Plays with no artistic merit but which clearly delineate some important themes - like (sorry but) Ryan Craig's awful The Glass Room - they are endlessly tolerant ('confirms that big issues make for fascinating plays' Billington on The Glass Room, which got 3 stars to the sublime Waves's 2).

The one glorious exception is Love and Money (pictured), which has had almost miraculously positive reviews. But let's be clear, those reviews come at a cost. Perhaps misled by the programme notes which stress our debt society, some of the critics seem only happy to praise the play if they think it is a sociological snapshot of contemporary Britain, rather than the metaphorical, metaphysical play about belief, power and obligations to one another that the rest of us could see. The same happened with Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (pictured); whether they liked it or not, the critics have tended to write about the play as if it were a simple statement of opposition to US Imperialism. Well, maybe it is partly that but to say so involves blanking out the complexities of the form of that play, the disjunctions on the language, the delicacy of the relationship depicted, and the visual and spatial organisation of the production, and simply summarise what they feel is the content. This position damages these delicate plays in the rush to find a review-friendly 'theme' that can be captured in a paragraph. Such a position does not understand the play; it pays no attention to what is actually happening in front of them. And that, one might think, is key to the role of the critic.

The battle lines are drawn. On one side we have the literalists like Billington and Hare, proponents of the creeping hegemony of verbatim theatre, the people who like their plays to be foursquare and clear, who want similes but not metaphors, who like neatly defined topics, and plays that are 'about' things (preferably important social problems). And on the other side we have the metaphysicals: the artists, the modernists, the experimentalists, the lovers of language and ethics and metaphor and image, the examiners of the roots of politics and love and power and the way we live together.

There's a major skirmish on the horizon: in the Spring, the National is reviving Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, directed by Katie Mitchell. This play is a rallying flag for the artists; it's not literal, it's wholly ambiguous, it unusually shares creative responsibility between writer, director, designer and actor. It's one of the great turning points in British playwriting, one of those moments when playwrights woke up, saw not just how they could write but how they had to write - because yes yes, the world was different, and Crimp had seen that, and he saw that our pens and keyboards have to move differently.

What is that difference? What is the reason? Encore is not sure. It's something about the need to write plays that are not just about the world they see around them, that see beyond the way things are, that implicitly therefore do not share what Duncan in Love and Money celebrates as 'the absolute conviction that all this is right'. That represent the world in an alienated and formally distorted form that allow us to recognise but also to see as if for the first time, to see the world in its strangeness, not in its utter recognisability. Plays that do not engage in the tautologies of realism, that offer up a gap into which pours love and danger and difficulty and ambiguity and morality and metaphor and something other and beyond money and beyond politics and beyond all this all this all this.

Standards

2006-11-13T12:29:00.000Z

Whose Standard?

The Evening Standard Award nominations are out. Most of the categories are uncontroversial enough. But the Best New Play nominations are:

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan
Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard
The Seafarer by Conor McPherson

Frost/Nixon is fair enough. It's a very artful distillation of that famous encounter which gives the material weight and substance. The Seafarer is much harder to defend. It features, without doubt, some of the most utterly delicious acting this year. Jim Norton (pictured on the left) alone was worth the price of admission - a rich, wholly imagined, endlessly inventive comic performance. The wonderful sequence where Nicky arrives and is put in charge of the whiskey bottle is fantastic. Norton as Richard, amused by the anecdote that Nicky tells, gets increasingly desperate for a drop of the strong stuff, and his smile fixed on his face while he blindly and surreptitiously sticks a finger in his glass to see if it has been filled. Karl Johnson's long-suffering Sharky gives emotional weight to the show, his discomfort and genuine concern for his brother making a perfect foil for Norton's blind braggart. It's a hugely enjoyable evening. As a play though, the Faust plot that gives the evening its shape is a dreadful load of old cobblers; totally meretricious, a plot off the shelf, completely meaningless and vulgar. A flashily unthought-out piece of playmaking. The rest of the play is so enjoyable, we wish he'd found some other principle of construction than reaching for a hand-me-down myth.

But why is Rock 'n' Roll here? Well, it's obvious: because it's by Tom Stoppard and the critics are all in awe. But, Jesus, can't they see? It's such a bloody awful, boring evening. It's so wordy and pompous and half-baked. The ludicrous notion that rock 'n' roll is the real spirit of revolution: how on earth are we supposed to take that seriously faced with 'Welcome to the Machine' and 'Welcome to the Jungle'? With the horrible corporate rock of a 1990s Stones tour. Aren't we all bored now with Stoppard's utterly undigested research being spun out to us? The absurd subplot of the wife, purely and nakedly a function of Stoppard's etiolated intellectual structure. The pitiful mystification of Syd Barrett as Pan. Encore liked Syd as much as the next man (as long as that next man isn't Stoppard) but let's get a sense of perspective here. He made good music for a couple of years, and his decline was as sharp and total as Stoppard's musical taste.

The problem is that our critics have developed a very bad habit. Everyone understands that it must be hard to be a critic; you need to write your review, based on a single viewing, within an hour. And of course, we need them to do that, because a review needs to come out early in the run. But this means that many reviewers clearly spend the evening thinking how to write the review rather than watching the play. The more waspish of them - yes we're talking about you, de Jongh - sit thinking of witty ways of using the play against the company. But all of them look for messages and subjects that they can expend a paragraph or two on. Billington is the biggest culprit here, usually spending more time on the fucking social problem that he has detected in the play's subject matter than he does on the design and lighting about which he rearely has anything to say. But it's universal. And what this means is (a) plays like Rock 'n' Roll which drone on and on and on about a range of topics (what is revolution? how have we mistranslated Sappho? what is the history of the British left?) get full marks because basically they have half-written the review for them; (b) plays that do not have clearly identifiable social issues, or are deliberately ambiguous in their references get very bad ones.

The obvious example of the latter - and it's the most astonishing omission from the list - is Mark Ravenhill's The Cut (pictured). The play was slammed by the critics, absolutely hammered. And why? Because - outrageously - Ravenhill refuses to explain exactly what he is saying. He doesn't spell it out for the benefit of the critic who fancies an early night. In fact it is pellucid, clear, beautiful and haunting. It displays a new vigour and precision in Ravenhill's use of language. It sets out a political scenario with insight, wit and vigour. Who can forget McKellen's state torturer, eating his evening meal in the emotional cool of his marital home, asserting, with unconscious irony, 'I'm a good man. At the end of the day I'm a good man'. But The Cut is not on the list of nominations. A major play by one of our most important writers is ignored because it doesn't pander to the critics' working conditions and refuses to compromise its artistry just to make their lives easier. It is an extraordinary situation, since it is the play of the year so far, and will, Encore predicts, be considered one the plays of the decade. There are countless other examples of critics demolishing plays because they can't reduce their complexity to a single banal propositional sentence. After a week in which it took Berlin's Schaubühne to give London its first proper vision of Blasted on a main stage (the Court 2001 revival was a sorry affair), we should be reminded that the play lack of a single, obvious, stitch-it-on-a-cushion-cover, give-it-to-a-character-to-say message is what lay behind the critics' original ridicule of the play. It's a shameful situation.

Posters at the National

2006-10-07T17:10:00.000+01:00

Posters at the National

The National's decision to make available a generous selection of its past theatre posters (at, let's just point out, scandalous cost) unfortunately reveals rather plainly the sharp decline of the design work recently. Look at the difference between these images.

The poster on the left isn't all that imaginative. But it's a modern image, which already makes the connection Brecht is making with the technology of our age, and it is estranging in a certain sense: the earth seen from elsewhere, the earth displaced from the centre of vision, suggesting the object of Galileo's own struggle. The colours are muted but strong the lunar surface contrasting with the partially shadowed earth, struggling perhaps to emerge. The earth's vulnerability is suggested as is, faintly, an atomic structure that underscores the nuclear politics against which Brecht wrote his crucial second draft. Tonally, subtly, the poster suggests the dark polarities of the play. What does the 2006 poster tell us? It tells us that Simon Russell Beale is in the production and that's it.

The National has through-branded itself across all its print material. The sans-serif font, emphasising and varying the letter design only with emboldening. It looks modern, and the diagonal arrangement is a subtle nod to a period of design from the late 1960s. Look at this poster:

It's actually from 1968, though it could easily have been used at any time over the past three years. The diagnonal lettering suggests a modernist era of design though the colour palette is contemporary. The starkness and clarity of the font is both accessible and imposing. These things are all appropriate to the theatre they represent.

But some less exciting principles also appear to inform the new designs. They almost all have human figures on them. Often the figures are looking at the camera and the viewer. Perhaps this is designed to make us feel connected to the image (if we are simpletons). Otherwise the images are very noise-free; no castlists as in the Galileo image, colour restricted to the lettering, the only non-essential detail being the names of the sponsors, which is a clear sign of the difference between then and now. While images from an earlier era show action, the body in motion, a moment of emotional intensity, conflict or abandon, the new human figures are usually in repose, not in the midst of some moment of, well, drama as in Edward II. The effect is to rebrand the image of modern, efficient, cool, streamlined, and very very boring. Look at these:

The left is full of drama, life, colour. It tells us about the design of the show, that elegant metal loop linking the jaunty title to the comic image below. The sense of a plot, the absurdities of the alchemical processes are all captured. We know the kind of play it'll be and we have a sense of the production and vaguely of the kind of story. What do we know about The Alchemist in 2006? We know that it has Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale in it. Admittedly the whispering motif tells us something about the fraud plot that structure the play but this is rather cancelled out by Alex Jennings's steady gaze at the camera which seems faintly amused but is otherwise expressionless, an effect enhanced by the cool monochromaticism of the image. While 1996's poster could be accused of being too busy, ten years later we seem to have gone in entirely the opposite direction, the poster aggressively refusing to tell us anything about the show at all.

Look at these images; it's hard to imagine a duller series of posters, less inclined to give you the slightest sense of what the show is about:

The posters don't always simply advertise the cast. There are more abstract or intriguing images. But another constraint prevents these from being truly effective. The National recently signed a deal with Getty Images and most of the non-cast images are taken from the Getty archive. This is, no doubt, an extensive library. But since they can only use non-recognisable images, with that cool, affectless sheen, their choices are much reduced, and some of the matches of image to play are flimsy. For Iphigenia in Aulis (pictured) they used an image of a young girl, gazing vacantly into the camera. This is quite meaningless unless you already know the play, and even then it doesn't declare very much. For The UN Inspector (pictured), they used a rather more striking image, an almost Pythonesque bureaucrat with a suitcase on his shoulder, obscuring his head. This is a good image, nicely surreal and appealing. It sort of picks up the theme that the inspector is more a figure of their guilty imaginations than a real person. But it says little about the style or tone of the show. You might realise it was a comedy, but not that it was a farce. In fact nothing about the image suggests anything about period, genre, subject or style. When you compare it with the impishly witty poster for The Government Inspector (pictured below), it's clear how vague and imprecise the more recent poster is.

I suppose the role of the poster has changed. They used to be flyposted around the area. There's less passing trade now and the sources of information are much broader than they were twenty years ago. You rarely see a National Theatre poster anywhere except in and around the building. So it's largely to advertise what's on to people who have already made a commitment to the National by being there. Branding helps clarify the National's profile across all media. But it's a pity that the imagination that went into the posters has so dramatically dwindled. It places disproportionate significance on the actor; yes, everyone wants theatres to be full but if people are there to see the actor rather than the play, something will get lost from the experience. At their best, posters are a way of leading audiences into the imaginative experience of the theatre; just advertising who's going to be in it does not lead to any act of imagination at all, just to the experiencing of looking at a famous actor.

What's disappointing is that so much else at the National has changed for the better in the last three or four years. It's become a genuinely exciting place to go. Ultimately perhaps, the quality of the posters does not matter so much - maybe it's as trivial as worrying about the poor standard of the adverts on TV - but the posters do have a function of preparing an audience for the event they may wish to see, and in representing the National Theatre to the world and to memory. They impress themselves upon history and it would be a shame if the sheen of bland star-shots is allowed to characterise the National's current era. It also suggests that somewhere along the line, the National's marketing department has developed an attitude to its audience that is condescending to the point of contempt. It's a kind of virus and needs to be stopped before it spreads.

Two Marias

2006-09-24T15:37:00.000+01:00

Two Marias

...is the title of an old play by Bryony Lavery, about two girls killed in a car crash. Eerily appropriate for the continuing high-speed disaster that is How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Having spent a month denying that there was an alternative Maria waiting in the wings to play at least half the performances, Andrew Lloyd Webber's company has announced that Emma Williams (pictured - and who we named six weeks ago as the ringer) is withdrawing from the production, allegedly because she didn't want to be limited to two performances a week. So what was the deal? Emma Williams, let's face it, was never going to take a job as understudy. And now, of course, the callers are asking to see the one off the telly, so they reduced her role and she's backed out.

It reveals, as clearly as you could imagine, that everything we have said all along is correct: that Lloyd Webber and the egregious Ian David always knew who they wanted and did everything to ensure she won. Last week The Independent published allegations that the show was rigged in other ways:

There were rumours that the producers had hired a 'plant' to infiltrate the
show. Then there were claims of favouritism from two unsuccessful contestants after they learnt that Fisher was recording a CD to accompany the show before the final. Claims were made that the show, watched by 10 million viewers, was edited to put certain contestants in a bad light, and that some performers benefited from the choice of songs they had to sing.

Which makes sense, because it would be crazy not to ensure that you cast the person you want - but, if that's what you're going to do, don't pretend that the public are in charge. The cash that this ludicrous and sordid show will put in the producers' pockets is precisely matched by the bad taste is leaves in our mouths.

Sunday Plays

2006-09-14T16:47:00.000+01:00

Something for the Weekend

Nick Hytner has announced that he'd like the National to open on Sundays. Or rather he still would like the National to open on Sundays, since he also declared this in June. For someone who is so keen to open his theatre on a Sunday, he seems to be doing surprisingly little about it, as BECTU claim that they have had no official approach. And BECTU are the only ones likely to drive a hard bargain since most theatre workers are contracted according to a set number of performances and it won't mean a contractual change as such.

The Telegraph earlier this year reported that the National are offering themselves as a battering ram on behalf of the regional theatres who don't feel strong enough to argue it through with BECTU themselves. At an Arts Council meeting in October 2005 the National offered to spend eighteen months gathering information and costing out the proposal before introducing the scheme. The National, of course, has a very particular reason for wanting Sunday opening since it has an almost guaranteed audience; the redevelopment of the South Bank over the last few years means that there is now an established tourist walk that takes in the whole South Bank complex, from the London Eye, to Tate Modern and The Globe and then on past the Clink and off to Tower Bridge. The National, since its 90s redesign, is beautifully placed to become a stop along the way, but on a Sunday its eyes are closed. It is hard to imagine that the National wouldn't be able to fill at least a mid-afternoon matinee, perhaps a lunchtime and a late-afternoon matinee on a Sunday. Would most regional theatres have the same clear benefit from Sunday opening. You would expect double time, perhaps time and a half, on a Sunday. Are the audiences there to make that worthwhile?

The union's scepticism is understandable but a scheme that allows days off in lieu, an either/or for Saturdays or Sundays, a healthy overtime rate, or some combination of the three, should put most fears at rest. Given that shopping is universal on a Sunday and that most galleries and museums are available, that the cinemas are open and football is now as likely on Sunday as Saturday, it seems hard to justify the theatre's six-day week. The old proposal has always been to trade it off against Mondays, traditionally a hard day to sell, though the cheap deals that have been Monday inducements (notably at the Court) would disappear under such a scheme.

Of course, there have been some less sensible worries. John Roberts of the Lord's Day Observance Society (no, there really is one), has expressed the comments of his members with great clarity, pondering, 'It is fine going to see entertainment on a Sunday but what about the people working on the stage, backstage?' Which sounds like a humanitarian, even socialist concern. 'We are in danger of losing the concept of the family unit,' he added, as he carefully bolted the stable door.

Why can't families go to the theatre together, one would like to know. One suspects that Christians hide behind the idea of the family get-together because even they are not brazen enough to complain that it'll stop people going to church. Because if the family unit is a relic, mass church attendance isn't even in living memory.

There is something to be said for the communitas and sense of communal identity that comes from a shared day off, but this battle was lost a long time ago. The flexible working and 24-hour culture that we have been creeping towards over the last fifteen years mean that people find different ways of connecting, whether that be nongeographical forms of connectivity, virtual communities, or other ways of slicing one's identity to make connections that aren't mere accidents of birth. The theatre is, if anything, one of the more robust forms of collective cultural experience. More self-conscious and particular than cinema, less competitively-focused than football.

Which is why Encore supports Sunday opening.

STOP PRESS: Christian Hypocrite Arrested

2006-09-05T10:14:00.000+01:00

STOP PRESS: Christian Hypocrite Arrested

Encore readers will, I am sure, be delighted by the news that Stephen Green has been arrested at the gay Mardi Gras event in Bute Park, Cardiff, after refusing to stop handing out leaflets condemning homosexuality on the theologically dubious grounds of its condemnation in Leviticus (officially the most ludicrous book of the Bible).

Green, you will remember, organised a letter-writing compaign and pickets outside the BBC to stop the broadcast of Jerry Springer the Opera. He organised pickets outside the Cambridge Theatre to intimidate audience members from going in. He sent threatening letters around the country's regional theatres to intimidate them out of booking the tour of the show, with success in some places.

So it is delightful to see that he has undergone his own road to Damascus moment.

Speaking about righteousness, morality, sin, repentance and the forgiveness sinners can find in the cross of Jesus Christ may well offend the fragile sensibilities of homosexuals, but should the police have a partisan unit whose job is to round up Christian dissidents, treat them like thought criminals and trample on freedom of speech?

It would be kindest to ignore his silly remarks about the police (who have, of course, never remotely targeted homosexuals to bump up their arrest figures...). That would be churlish. It is delightful to see that Green is now such a firm believer in freedom of speech. We look forward to seeing Christian Voice pursue its new policy with vigour and verve.

God, Theatre, and Match-Fixing

2006-09-04T00:13:00.000+01:00

God, Theatre and Match-Fixing

Stephen Green (pictured) is the head of Christian Voice, the organisation who largely failed to get Jerry Springer barred from regional theatres across the land. His arguments were non-existent, as you can see from the disgraceful letter that he sent to regional theatres last March. What does he say?

Having seen [Jerry Springer: The Opera], I can say with some feeling that the show is crude, offensive and blasphemous in the extreme. At the very least, it is not a family show and will damage the reputation of any theatre which puts it on.

The first sentence is an assertion without evidence, beefed up only by an appeal to emotion. The second is a non sequitur (I can think of several theatres whose reputations would be damaged by putting on a family show). On this firm foundation, Green darkly reported his 'success' in London and demanded to know whether the theatre managers were planning to host Jerry Springer. Sadly, some theatres did respond to the intimidation: basically, the threat that lots of ghastly Christian nutjobs would be standing outside their theatre bothering paying customers. But only some: some of the responses like that of national treasure Gwenda Hughes of the New Victoria Theatre, Stoke on Trent, were much better:

For the attention of Stephen Green

Sir,

I have received your letter concerning JERRY SPRINGER, THE OPERA.

Future programming is a confidential matter between employees and our Trustees until a season is announced and our brochure distributed. Details of our current season are available on our website. Should you wish to receive our brochure, published three times a year, please ring the Box Office number and we will put you on our mailing list.

It is my responsibility to decide what plays, concerts and events are programmed at this theatre, subject to ratification by the Trustees.

I will continue to programme as I see fit and appropriate for the organisation. Neither I, nor the Trustees, will change the programme or the programming policy as a result of threats, bullying or intimidation from any outside body.

I hope this makes the situation quite clear.

Yours faithfully,

Gwenda Hughes

Of course, all that fuss was a long time ago. But he's still around, and it might interest Encore's readers to get a glimpse of some of the things he's been saying since the tour ended.

Responding to Hurricane Katrina, he observed that New Orleans was due to host the 'Southern Decadence' event, an annual lesbian and gay culture and arts festival. He argued:

Most would say a hurricane is an 'Act of God'. Hurricanes are named by a
system of rotating boy/girl/boy/girl names after the letters of the alphabet. By one of those co-incidences which only Almighty God can manufacture, the name 'Katrina' means 'purity'. A version of the name 'Catherine', it comes from the same root as a 'cathartic' or 'purifying' experience. Purity blew into New Orleans and purity broke the levees and flooded the city. When a hurricane has been particularly devastating, the name is retired. There will never be another 'Katrina' and that may mean that New Orleans may only have this single opportunity to respond to the awesome purity of God. God often gives only one warning.

Unfortunately for this ambulance-chasing halfwit, the French Quarter, the centre of the festival and site for the festival's climactic parade, was the least affected by the disaster. The burden of the press release is that, by finding the strength to continue with the festival, even though scaled down and elsewhere, these survivors of a natural disaster were showing great disrespect for the dead. As someone once said, let he who is without sin, Stephen, cast the first stone. Or put another way, shut the fuck up, you stupid hypocrite.

All of this is based on some very selective Biblical citations. No doubt even more fiendish is the exegesis that entitles Christian Voice to rail against plans for road-pricing, not a topic that casual readers will have noticed Jesus making much of. He's on more conventional ground when he reports on the prayer vigils that attended the first civil partnerships, noting, strangely, that

Ordinary people would be revolted by the sight of two men or two women kissing in a parody of a marital embrace

Intriguing. Encore is not quite sure what a 'parody of a marital embrace' looks like. Is it mouth-closed, both partners looking away and wanting to get it over with? Perhaps Stephen Green and John Beyer, Mary Whitehouse's successor as head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, now rebranded Mediawatch, could demonstrate?

Last week, though, Stephen Green really ramped up the hilarious craziness of his proclamations. Watching the recent Cricket Test between England and Pakistan, Green was disturbed at what he calls 'the way in which Pakistan were giving it large about Islam'. (What this means is members of the team talking about their Islamic faith. The swines!) So he did what any normal, ordinary, right-thinking Christian loo-lah would do. He prayed. Oh lord - we imagine it went - smite down these infidels, bringing their false religion into this Christian country. And lo, the Lord, according to Green, did indeed smite them down, with 'the sort of unexpected event which only Almighty God can bring about'. Getting Darrell Hair to detect ball-tampering by the Pakistan bowlers. Man, that really is moving in a mysterious way.

What God is saying, says Green confidently, is that 'if we Christians place all our trust in Him, show Him our prayer is serious by doing the simple and obvious things which only we can do, we can safely leave the miraculous to Him. God will never fail to surprise us'.

The utter, utter fuckwit.

No Smoking

2006-08-20T16:19:00.000+01:00

No Smoking

In Edinburgh, Mel Smith make a big song and dance about his 'right' to smoke cigars while performing a monologue about Winston Churchill, suggesting that the Scottish Parliament's ban would have 'delighted Adolf Hitler'. He declared his intention to defy the ban and light up a Havana during a performance of
Allegiance at the Assembly, though, after hearing that William Burdett-Coutts who manages the venue, would have been fined £1000, the venue closed down and most likely not relicensed for performance, he backed down.

Encore does think it is strange that you can't smoke fake cigars and cigarettes under the terms of the Scottish Parliament's ban, and thus refuses to see a distinction between fiction and reality that is crucial to the theatre's working, but Mel Smith's posturing is indefensible.

The reason for the ban is to prevent workers being forced to inhale smoke. The ushers, technicians and cleaners at the Assembly Rooms would have to have inhaled Mel Smith's cigar smoke for the duration of the run. This is not reasonable and it doesn't do anything for Mel Smith's case and credibility that he did not acknowledge this point. At no point as far as we could see did he make the case for being allowed to smoke a fake cigar. It came across, finally, as though he simply felt he should be allowed to smoke a cigar whenever he fancied it, an impression reinforced by his post-show puffs out of the window (for which there was of course no justification). Insofar as he did make an 'artistic' defence of smoking cigars, it was that cigar smoking is essential to a portrait of the man Churchill. But this is a weak defence for several reasons: first, Churchill did many things, including, by some accounts, farting constantly in cabinet during the 1950s; I didn't see the show but I doubt that Mel Smith would have cultivated farts with the same enthusiasm he reserves for his Romeo y Julietta; the director of the show, Brian Gilbert, protested, 'I am all for a smoking ban in bars but not to have an actor smoking while he represents a character in history who did smoke is absurd' But that argument is hopeless - the same argument would allow anyone playing Brutus to actually kill Julius Caesar; second, a real cigar is not essential to a portrait of Churchill. Look, here's a portrait of Churchill:

He's got a cigar, but it's not a real one. It's an image created out of paint. No one who understands anything about theatre can say that a production in which the props (including, therefore, the cigars) are mimed is any less accurate a portrait of Churchill than one that cleaves to naturalism as its method; third, is a cigar essential to a performance of Churchill? Is it absolutely central to any portrait? More important than a jowly face, lugubrious speech, and a body of Mel Smith proportions? Because, look, here's a portrait of Churchill that adorns the front page of the Churchill Society's website.

At least, I think it's Churchill. But he has no cigar so maybe Mel Smith would tell us it could be anybody.

Encore think the arts need defending, and defending against a blanket ban that does not respect the particularity of theatrical representation, but let's remember that the smoking ban was introduced in the name of public health, a cause as important as the health of the theatre. This kind of campaign does nobody any good.