"Where are you going? This work has not yet reached cessation."

Gordon's alive!

...I don't mean Gordon Brown, obviously, for whom the phrase 'dead man walking' could easily have been coined -- or, perhaps not walking but smiling: that weird Malvolio rictus that his advisors idiotically trained him into a while back, and which gives him the ineffable air of a man at a royal garden party who doesn't want the Queen to know that a bee's just crawled inside his bell-end.

No, I just thought I'd don my Brian Blessed sock-puppet to announce ventriloquially my return to the fray: not a little frayed myself, admittedly, and not feeling overmuch like the hero for whom Bonnie Tyler is (presumably) still holding out, but happy to be re-addressing myself to the world of Thompsonian movement, after our own little Northern Rock meltdown back there.

Before I attempt to account for myself, I had better note that what follows will strike the sensitive reader as dismayingly parochial, and that even the dust-bunny petting zoo beneath my bed, where I have mostly been racking myself with self-pitying gurgles since my last post, was penetrated by the ghastly news of natural disaster (and grievous manmade exacerbation) in Myanmar and in Sichuan Province, and, more locally and (I hope) less calamitously, of the wretched betrayal that London chose to visit upon itself earlier in the month. Pretty bleak stuff, all in all, and an odd time for me to, y'know, cheer up. Though of course there was the dazzlingly bright note of the celebrations for the 60th birthday of Israel: another great British invention -- no, no, please don't thank us, we'll only get embarrassed.

Anyway. In all this time, I've little to report, I fear. I was sad and gloomy and despondent for a while, and then awfully busy and awfully tired, and then I got sick -- we're talking a curious portmanteau man-flu (OK, yup, let's call it portmanflu and be done with it) which, with a forcefulness bordering on the caddish, confined me to bed for most of the last bank holiday weekend, and whose grisly final throes are still making me feel slightly below par. (A phrase I suddenly don't understand: surely 'below par' is a good thing? For golfers, anyway...?) And then as I started to pull myself together, my computer got sick and was, for the best part of a fortnight, almost unusable. Righting it has been an unbelievably time-consuming process, which still isn't complete, but the present degree of illness (in my laptop as in myself) does seem to be liveable-withable. The moral of the story is, never click on a banner ad if you don't know where it's going to take you, even if it appears to have Charlie Brown on it. I ended up with a hard-to-identify trojan called Vundo, now dispatched, and a still-present rootkit which even Blacklight and such have been unable to cleanse. (I can however, if you ever find yourself troubled by spyware nastinesses, thoroughly recommend Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware.)

So, that -- plus a fair bit of Suffering for my Art -- more on that in a bit -- has added up to a binbagful of spanners in the proverbial works. I expect my readership may have dwindled to pre-2007 levels during the hiatus, for which I have only myself to blame. By 'myself', obviously, I mean God. And Boris.

Before I report back from the happier frontiers of theatre, I had better, rather reluctantly, say a little something further to my previous intimations regarding the unravelling of a significant project. I'm immensely sorry and unhappy to say that that prediction -- which, at the time I wrote it, even I thought was a bit of self-indulgent pessimism -- turned out to be accurate. If you've been following my mentions here (and at Dennis's blog) over the past year of the development of a project called An Apparently Closed Room, then I regret to say it's come to a crashing halt. I really don't want to say very much about this turn of events, partly because it feels inappropriate to do so in this place, and partly because it still feels very raw and very distressing to think or talk about. The basic facts are that my collaborator and I came to a point where what had seemed like slight and resolvable differences of opinion and emphasis about the scope of the project suddenly became unmanageable and irreconcilable, indicating I guess a much deeper and more profound set of dissonances between our respective perspectives and expectations. I had hoped and expected that at least we would be able to find some middle ground on which to keep talking and agreeing to explore, but that too turned out to be impossible.

I should say straight away that a similar project, under a different name, and with a different ambit (and obviously a different creative team), will still take place -- the commitments to Theatre-in-the-Mill in Bradford, and Artsadmin here in London, are already in place, and it would be quite wrong not to honour those; I'm also feeling pretty optimistic, to be honest, about the prospects for a reframed and refreshed inquiry. So it's not all despair. But to lose the original project, and the body of work that had been developed towards it -- not just over the last year but since the early R&D phase in the summer of 2005 -- is the most awful blow I think I've experienced as a maker, as well as one of the most daunting losses I've had to deal on a personal level. The inquiry that my collaborator and I were engaged in on the AACR project is, without any exaggeration, the most important work I've done in thinking through the questions that are most significant for me in my practice -- or, to put it another way, it was the best work I've done. But what made the articulation of those questions possible was the depth of the working relationship that I've had with that one artistic collaborator, who is, in my experience, a uniquely gifted performer, for whose courageous and sympathetic outlook I have had boundless reason to be grateful over the past few years. The longevity and the deep feeling of that relationship simply feels unmatchable, and this excruciating termination of our experimental work together diminishes me as an artist, and reduces the compass of what I feel I can dare to believe is possible. But now I find myself tangling with the other problem that arises in discussing the situation: my sense of it sounds, I know, hyperbolic, hysterical even. So I'll shut up and move on -- a strategy that, after all, has got me through worse times than this.

I've had the good fortune, at any rate, in the four weeks since that very bad news, to be incredibly busy (as well as ill and asleep, to varying degrees). ...SISTERS, my New Directions project for The Gate Theatre and Headlong, has been in rehearsal -- until today, in an otherworldly residence in Queensway occupied by various organizations concerned with the promotion of (what else?) Latvia. After the jump we'll be working in situ at the Gate, in preparation for opening a week on Thursday.

Those who recognize even some of the names listed in my previous post will know that, yet again, I have the unbelievable good fortune to be in a room with some extraordinary actors; we have laughed a lot, as I hoped we might, and some rare and very beautiful things have happened: and, following our first run of the whole piece this afternoon, I am more encouraged than ever to believe that the project is going to bear fruit in ways that both exactly match and wonderfully and uncontrollably exceed my original aspirations for it. But, for the record, it has been -- though I don't suppose my physical state has helped much -- an incredibly draining and mind-mangling process too. For those who don't know, I should very briefly explain that we've taken Chekhov's Three Sisters (in a new but not re-fangled version I wrote last month), dismantled it, and created from it a sort of cross between a slightly wonky reconstruction, a dance piece, an installation, and -- above all, I guess -- a game, in which the actors are encouraged repeatedly to recombine passages and fragments from the text, playing whichever character they choose at whatever moment. Practically everything is quite strictly framed by constraints and parameters, but will nevertheless be almost entirely improvised afresh in each performance: an exchange between, say, Masha and Vershinin might be played by two actors one evening, by five actors the next night (multiple Mashas, perhaps) in an entirely different way, and maybe on the third night not crop up at all.

It is, by some way, the most fiendishly complex project I've ever been involved in -- and immensely, and one might almost say unfairly, demanding on the actors, who have to memorize massive amounts of the text, and be able to navigate it sort of hypertextually, whileretaining a deep -- and very necessary -- fidelity to the emotional currents of the piece. This is not the arch ludicity of a Wooster Group reconstruction, or some callow vandalising of a classic text on behalf of a militant tendency of play-wrecking theatre artists. Jane Edwardes from Time Out, who came to interview me yesterday, pulled me up pretty sharp on this notion of 'fidelity' -- how could such a provisional approach produce a faithful rendition? But, whatever Chekhov's suppoed "intentions" for Three Sisters may have been in 1900, it comes down to us as a text for theatre: a category whose meaning and orientation inevitably shifts with the changing social and aesthetic position of theatre: and the matter of fidelity is therefore a matter first of all of engaging with, and yielding (carefully and inquisitively) to, what theatre now is. For me, the critical question is liveness, and what we mean by this notion of being "live" -- a notion, as I'm sure I've said here before, that is as frequently invoked in support of the vulnerable practice of theatre by those who cling most assiduously to its near-historical conventions as to those who wish to throw everything up in the air. This is what fidelity to a theatre text means; fidelity to a literary text (for example, O, I dunno, Three Sisters by Chekhov, maybe) is something else again, about which I don't intend in the course of my theatrical work to care for a second.

Though Jane was perfectly courteous and asked some interesting questions, and though we have had nothing but support and encouragement from both the Gate and Headlong -- the persons associated with both of which continue to rise and rise in my estimation, it seems to me that the reception of ...SISTERS may well be cool, or even hostile, or merely baffled: even among those parties who might be expected to be most supportive. It simply proceeds from the most alien assumptions: one of which is that it is better to be interesting than to be sure. Though I think the actors will continue to get more and more skilful and sophisticated in their playing of the game, I imagine quite a bit of almost all of the performances will not, or will not quite, "work". It will produce moments of surprising beauty and clarity, but also stretches of confusion and lostness, for players and audience alike. Is it asking a lot for greater, or richer, value to be placed on the creating of such uncertain and sometimes annoying conditions, for the unanticipated loveliness that will from time to time arise out of those conditions and then immediately be gone and unrepeatable, than on the crafting of an utterly predictable version of an often-seen play? Possibly. At sixteen quid a pop, in fact, almost certainly. It's a question that we've asked ourselves, mostly in the poignant form: Why can't we just do a straight Three Sisters? Well, perhaps one night we will. In the meantime, I continue to remind myself that, if the worst we do is frustrate our audience, their frustration will not be worse -- or any longer lasting -- than the frustration that many of us feel on being confronted with productions whose every guiding motive has been to shut down every effect of liveness, in favour of a vague simulation, a 'magic' that we sort of proverbially learn inheres in theatre, but almost never sense for ourselves.

Having said all of which, please come and see the show -- at least once! (I'm hoping one or two folks will succumb to the urge to visit twice or more, to test our assertions of nightly uniqueness...) The way it's already coming together physically in the Gate, and the literal inability of all six of these actors to make a boring or crass decision, suggest that anyone with attention to give and a heart and a brain that are even rudimentarily connected will find something to enjoy and appreciate. It has been, as I say, an exhausting process, simply because we are all, in every hour of every day, constantly and tacitly repositioning ourselves right on the edge of the darkness shaded within which lurks everything we don't know how to do yet. If it weren't for the exceptionally bright and fearsomely switched-on Wendy Hubbard, who officially is assistant director on the project but actually, at the very least, its co-director, I think I would have had a terminal nosebleed long ago. To be surrounded by these people all through the working week is an indescribable privilege; I wish I could up my game a bit, to meet them where they are, at the speed and sensitivity of their own ongoing discoveries -- but on the whole, the pedal's to the metal here and there ain't much happening. Hopefully in the upcoming couple of weeks, the adrenalin going one way will meet the caffeine going the other way, and I'll manage to be the director I dream of being when I write these sodding applications to do such brain-burstingly complex and ambitious stuff. Time will tell; or perhaps you will.

One pretty nice consequence of emerging from these recent emotional doldrums has been the reopening of my capacity to feel inspired by things. The Tate Modern Duchamp / Man Ray / Picabia has lingered, though I don't think I'm going to be able to get back to it before it closes on Sunday, which is a pity: the Picabia stuff in particular was a constant revelation. Since then, a big highlight was Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Myth, which came in to Sadler's Wells for two nights last week. I've written here before of my real love for (much of) Cherkaoui's work -- though one of the dismaying things about the accompanying programme for Myth was the resumé which made apparent how much stuff he's made that I haven't had the chance to see. Myth appears to have underwhelmed reliable friends and unreliable critics alike, but I found it perhaps his most enthralling and most richly conceived and perfectly crafted piece to date. Some elements of his aesthetic language may be more familiar now, but in most respects I continue to find those elements -- and in particular his fixation on the point where the individual meets the group, and the private meets (and sometimes swaps places with) the civic -- almost unbearably exciting. I was extremely agog for two hours straight: and I can think of hardly any other maker who would be likely to elicit such a reaction from me. I'm supposed to be reviewing Myth for Total Theatre, so when I've ordered my thoughts a bit more, I'll say so. In the meantime, please accept my general bowled-overness in lieu of a more lavishly articulated description.

More recently, this Wednesday I found myself in Manchester for the first UK presentation of Jerk, the latest piece by director Gisele Vienne and (it's that man again) Dennis Cooper, whose Kindertotenlieder at NottDance last year was one of the most striking dance-theatre works I've seen in recent times. Jerk is on an altogether smaller scale -- it was shown at the little, down-at-heel but irresistibly funky Islington Mill in Salford, more usually home to such visiting musical luminaries as Simon Joyner, Alexander Robotnick, and -- tomorrow night -- the Television Personalities. It's a solo piece for one performer -- the fathomlessly charismatic Jonathan Capdevielle, who has worked repeatedly with Vienne over the past several years, and who was performing Jerk in English for the first time.

The central character portrayed by Capdevielle, or with whom he is associated in the piece, is a real figure, David Brooks, who is currently -- and, it's fair to say, for the foreseeable future -- serving a prison sentence for murder. Cooper's Brooks tells his story through a kind of reduced re-enaction using puppets -- this being a skill which Brooks has acquired during his incarceration. As with so much of Cooper's work -- and this is brilliantly realised by Vienne and faultlessly achieved by Capdevielle -- the laughter reflex is ruthlessly unzipped into its components of fear, embarrassment, distress and desire, meaning that the early humour -- dark and uneasy but not expensive -- quickly deliquesces, and the rest of the short piece's dance down the knife-edge of what we can bear to laugh at, and what we can stand to confront, is as slippery and confounding as the violated bodies we are asked to encounter. Within this artistic territory (and who knows what other realworld spaces that abut its perimeter), the instability of identity, and the desolate but inescapably compelling eroticism of that fantastic passivity that allows -- or even requires -- any identity to be projected onto the surfaces of the remote 'other', insists finally and insatiably that the unknowability, the unfixability, of the body -- as a kind of factual effigy of the individual personality that it (barely) contains -- is both the unrelenting motor of desire and the terrible tragedy at its furthest reach. ...Or, if you prefer: there's a lot of puppets fistfucking each other and the sound effects are pretty funny, and then there's a lot of stabbing and the sound effects aren't so funny after that.

The performance by Jonathan Capdevielle is simply astonishing, in that it manages to yoke two normally incompatible registers: virtuosity (he brilliantly handles several puppets and voices all of them; later, an extended passage of ventriloquised dialogue is pulled off with incredible flair and a genuinely unheimlich chill), and intimacy -- his rapport with the audience is so ingenuously produced and so deftly managed as to become basically irresistible. And so we are pulled into his orbit, into proximity with this profoundly lost and frightened soul: and in the ecstatic derangement of his ventriloquism, we know in an instant and quite candidly that we too contain many different voices, and cannot reliably distinguish those that are us from those that are not. In that respect, though Dennis jokingly apologised on his blog a few days ago for the lack of nudity in this show as compared with Kindertotenlieder, the nakedness of Jerk is fine and fraught and awesomely freighted; only the interpolation of a couple of printed texts, which we are asked to read at two points in the performance, lets us briefly off the hook of our sense of collectivity. In that light, the post-show Q&A that I had been invited to host (following a brilliant short reading by Cooper from his recent The Weaklings and upcoming Ugly Man) felt basically superfluous, though it was a terrific personal pleasure for me not only to pick up the face-to-face conversation with Dennis, but also to meet Gisele and Jonathan and to have the opportunity to draw a little closer in my encounter with their crucial and joyously intrepid work.

Another somewhat theatrical experience that I'm glad to have caught up with was a new production, for Radio 4, of Harold Pinter's Landscape, with Pinter himself and Penelope Wilton as the two weirdly connected, oddly detached characters Duff and Beth. Landscape, a shortish play from 1967, was the first piece of Pinter's that I really unstintingly loved, as a teenager (I had read The Caretaker and seen the then-recent Mountain Language, and at the time was interested but not wholly satisfied by either of them): I came to it through the near-legendary 1968 radio version with Eric Porter and Peggy Ashcroft in the two roles, and found it almost unbearably beautiful and disarming. This new production feels slightly too rushed -- if I remember that earlier version correctly, it ran almost ten minutes longer -- and I'm very much afraid that without any additional visual stimulus I find it hard to hear Penelope Wilton's voice without thinking of Richard Briers talking in a monotonous voice about valves; but if you don't know Landscape, or even if you do but you missed out on hearing this new version, I would recommend giving it a listen: which I am pleased to be able to facilitate (at least until someone pops up to tell me not to) by offering a download in mp3 format, here. It still strikes me as the apotheosis of Pinter's lived craft -- his humanity, his unsparingness, his unerring gifts for cadence and patterning, and his marvellous determination not to fill in the blanks that reverberate all around and within his most resounding works.

If all of this weren't enough, over the next few days I'll be cramming in visits to Goat Island's The Lastmaker at BAC, Philip Ridley's new play Piranha Heights at Soho, and as part of Sprint at CPT, Aegean Fatigue, the new piece in development from Petra's Pulse, the consistently intriguing performance partnership between Selina Papoutseli and Jamie Wood, which most recently gave rise to the estimable Donkey Shadow, though I find at this distance that it's their previous, rather underrated and underseen, piece Drinking the Dawn, with its ravishingly lovely stagings of distance, serenity and sensual knowledge, that most thrives in my memory. I'll try to report back on all of these, in due course. (Better let me get ...SISTERS open first, probably.)

Another, rather unexpected, source of inspiration in the past couple of weeks has been in re-engaging with two of the artistic figures who loomed largest in my sense of my practice perhaps a decade ago, but with whom I guess a kind of overfamiliarity or staleness set in: namely, Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. With the latter, I just happened to find a source for downloading her defining work, the four CDs of United States Live; listening to it again, the downside -- that she sounds exactly like Laurie Anderson, which can hardly be held against her but which obviously almost always in my experience signals others imitating or parodying her -- has its corollary upside: nobody does Laurie Anderson better than she does, and particularly in the ambition and the still-evident innovativeness of United States Live, there is such a lot to enjoy and admire.

As for Eno, the rapprochement came about because I was casting around for additional external stimulus for the almost infinite decision-making processes within ...SISTERS, and thought it might be a job (as indeed it turned out to be) for his Oblique Strategies. Tracking those down put me back in touch with his invaluable A Year With Swollen Appendices, which turns out to have insinuated itself into my thinking to an almost embarrassing and certainly unacknowledged degree: on almost every page is a thought, a sentence, a paragraph, that has obviously lived in my head for the last ten years or more, gradually becoming something that I was under the impression I had thought for myself. This in turn has re-fired my love for Eno's early solo music, and the pretty grim rush-hour commute to and from west London has been both enlivened and soothed by Taking Tiger Mountain and Before and After Science. There is, I think, a problem with Eno -- his intensely pragmatic outlook, his distaste for ideology, which sometimes leaves him floating in a capsule buoyed by his own ingenuity but unable to relate the span of his practices to the larger pressures of politics, economics and (especially) the undertows of industry. But the kind of wilful exertion with which he pursues ideas -- and inversions of those ideas -- is ultimately really kind of charming and, even now, can from time to time produce work of considerable value and undeniable originality.

The reanimated crush on Eno in turn had me tracking down Noatikl, the generative music software which has superseded Koan, beloved of the mid-90s Eno of Swollen Appendices. As yet, though, I can't get it to work -- or, it seems to be working, but I can't hear anything, and I don't have a lot of time to get to grips with it just now. A quicker fix has come through the reminder, from Tom (one-sixth of the pool of SISTERS), of the existence of Boomkat as a source for interesting new music that's neither as annoying and mainstream as iTunes, nor as patchy as some of the other (variably legal) mp3 outlets, nor as random as Usenet, nor as inscrutable as Rapidshare. I like Boomkat and, while I'm actually doing a paid gig, it doesn't hurt me to cough up some proper cash for interesting music. Current favourites: Samamidon, Helios, Need More Sources, Tape (as ever), and, especially, Arc Lab. -- What are yours?

And one last inspirational pointer: the extraordinary blog of an extraordinary fellow, my online pal and fellow member of the Coopintern, Slatted Light. He is smarter than a metric ton of foxes and has a more unerring eye for the beauty and the erotic charge of precisely detailed exploratory thinking than, I guess, anyone I know. He is in Sydney, which is both a drag and a sort of beacon. And it's probably good for him, that it stops me from actually following him around tugging his sleeve and asking him to say things again.

With this much work left to do, nothing, however sad and fucked-up it feels, can possibly actually be the end of the world, can it?

Thank you, people of Thompson's, for bearing with me while I lost my already nonlinear plot. I am once again open for business. Come and play. Everything's AOK.

And, as Kierkegaard reminds us, always finish on a song... I warn you, it's a tear-jerker.





Love, always, from the Controlling T.

p.s. Joe Luna -- if you read this -- I know I owe you mail beyond measure. This weekend, I hope...

Sub-prime

Slim pickings here at the Bank of late, I'm afraid. I hope I'll still be able to write a paragraph or two on Vivi Tellas, as previously trailed, though the promotional value of that piece is now somewhat diminished, seeing as how she left the country about three weeks ago. The interview with Rajni Shah is almost fully transcribed now -- a massively inspiring conversation, for me at least -- but will take a bit of licking into shape; that'll probably be the next thing to go up. I think I promised something on poetry as well, but I'm guessing that probably isn't going to happen -- I had intended that that post would include reports on the recent Crossing the Line reading by Tom Raworth and the brilliant Martin Corless-Smith, and on a brace of talks by Geoff Ward and Jeremy Noel-Tod: but I made it to neither event, in the end: life had me by the ear.

As it goes, things feel pretty low here: work currently is a slog at best, and at worst -- well, one project that's particularly close to my heart seems to be unravelling, which is always a grievous feeling, and makes me wonder whether I'm ever going to be in a position to make the work that I feel most personally compelled to make. Which is not to signal any disrespect or any lack of excitement in relation to the things that are definitely happening: loomingest of which is ...Sisters, which goes into rehearsal next week. This week therefore is mostly dominated by trying to write the version of the script that we're then going to -- ahem -- break. What I really want to be stuck into at the moment is the piece I've said I'll write for Plymouth, which is going to be a play about one of my longtime great heroes, the Victorian (so-called 'nonsense') poet Edward Lear. At a personal level I'm feeling just about sad and bleak and knotted-up and self-involved enough to be able to take that on at the moment. Everything currently feels like a retreat (I don't mean the good kind where you get colonics and finger-cymbals): and I could take that project to bed with me and pull the duvet over my head and not be completely wasting time. (It turns out, btw, that you can download from iTunes a 20-minute version of Stewart Lee's Pea Green Boat, which is based on Lear's 'The Owl and the Pussycat'; I knew about that show but never saw it; it's brilliantly, cruelly bleak, though thankfully it hits different notes than I intend to with my play. £7.99 is a bit steep, but so it goes.)

What else is new? Dennis Cooper came to town, which was fun, though intense -- which is not to say that Dennis is particularly intense, but spending that much time with anybody is pretty intense; Skins ended brilliantly but harrowingly and, I suspect, is more than a little responsible for my present state of mind; Alistair McCartney's The End of the World Book: A Novel arrived in the mail, and is a delightful, excruciating, warmly deadpan read, a sort of homoerotic mumblecore orgy of Barthelme and Perec and Laurie Anderson -- maybe I'll write more about it (and about Dennis's gorgeous new book of poems, The Weaklings) when I feel more up to the task; my favourite upscale porn site, Gay Teen Studio, est mort, which is genuinely pretty sad; so is David Eldridge's blog, which I regret, though I suspect it's a good decision from his point of view; the new Fall album is a rackety bit of business and good company, though the vague and inert and wretchedly despondent William Basinski stuff with which I'm intending to soundtrack ...Sisters feels closer to my current mood. You know, I think the failure of spring to really committedly arrive has become completely associated in my mind with the terrible horrorfilm resilience of Hillary Clinton. What's to become of us, eh.

Anyway, this is not a post; ceci n'est pas un post. This is just a placeholder to say, this blog is probably going to be hiding under its bed for a little while longer, experiencing the emotional equivalent of credit crunch. Sorry for the downturn.

In other news: Two biscuits waiting for a bus. Biscuit #1: "So, where do you live then?" Biscuit #2: "You honestly think I'm going to tell you? You'll just go round and steal my laundry."

Found proverb #2

"Astral beings have no anus."

(source: Pat Barker, interviewed in The New Yorker, March 17, 2008.)

Self-portrait as two separate Russian boys

p.s. Coming up shortly, or not unshortly, on Thompson's: Vivi Tellas; Rajni Shah; a poetry special. Don't touch that dial, kids.

p.p.s. For Ben, who asked a while ago -- and for anyone else who wants to know it -- I'm happy to be able to announce the now-complete cast of ...SISTERS. They are: Gemma Brockis; Catherine Dyson; Giulia Innocenti; Helen Kirkpatrick; Tom Lyall; and Melanie Wilson. You will forgive me, please, if I dance for a little while on the ceiling.

p.p.p.s. ...Oooh. What a feeling.

All your bunnies are belong to us

Lawrence Upton: NAMING for Chris Goode (2008)

A few days ago, DC, who's coming over in about three weeks to chat about the Rose Bruford project (which now has the umbrella title 'The Field, The Stream, The Building'), mentioned that he had "no mental image of [me]".

...I know how he feels. Pretty much every time I see my reflection, let alone any kind of photo or video or whatever, I wonder where the person I expect to see has gone. To be honest, I'm concerned that I may have been cannibalised by the weird blobby strange-faced looming hulk who keeps appearing in my stead. While I was vaguely wondering about a picture of myself that I might be able to post here that, on the one hand, wasn't too frightening to me (or to unprepared children or nervous animals who may be watching) but, on the other hand, wasn't lifted from those few months in 1994 where I quite liked how I looked, out of the blue Lawrence sent me the above: which seems like a more than serviceable mental image of me -- though, fair enough, it might not help Dennis recognize me when I pick him up at St Pancras. (Notwithstanding all of which, I'm enormously touched that Lawrence has made this: not least because, as with most of his visual pieces, it's also a score for performance, and I'd be more than excited to hear whatever matters might arise in that context... If you've never heard Lawrence perform his visual/sound/text works -- well, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc etc.)

Which in turn reminded me of one of the few relatively recent photos of me that I can not only stand to look at but also more or less recognize myself in.

If I remember correctly, this photo was taken by cris cheek (an old colleague of Upton's in the seminal though shortlived poetry/performance group jgjgjgjgjgjg... [as long as you can say it, that's our name], who as long ago as 1977 were tearing up Battersea Arts Centre with the kind of stuff that would send the present Apples & Snakes generation into an immediate postlapsarian freefall). It's of my reading at the first Total Writing London festival at Camden People's Theatre in June 2003. I'm performing 'An Introduction to Speed-Reading' for the first time, which is why I'm a bit blurry. The t-shirt is from John Cale's 1999 UK tour. Another photo of cheek's from the same event captures J.H. Prynne leaning against the exterior of the venue in a bogglingly stylish pair of sunglasses. Heady times.

So, (a) for those who wish to know: this isn't far off what I look like. Add five years and about 35lbs. And scribble on longer hair. (Incidentally, for those who haven't been around Thompson's since its early days, a lavish documentary feature on my changing hairstyles since my mid-teens can be found halfway down the archive for October 2006. I warn you, it's as scary as all conceivable fuck.)

And (b) the mental image of me reading self-immolatingly fast poetry takes us to the first of this post's specially formulated Easter eggs. I had intended to try and capture my Klinker gig last Tuesday on video, but failed to get the necessaries in order. Happily, the gods sent an excellent fellow called Joseph Luna, who made an on-the-hoof audio recording that I'm very, very pleased with. The sound quality, for one of those little digital voice recorders, is remarkably good; and I was pleased with the reading too and glad to have some record of it. There was a small but amazingly open and gratifyingly responsive audience -- quite often a Klinker feature, though not unfailingly... -- only some of whom were pals (including the brilliant and beautiful Charlie Phillips, who I haven't seen in a while, and who tells me I'm part of a burgeoning genre called 'mumblecore', which he explains on his excellent blog; as a loudly bawling goy, I hardly feel like a strong candidate, but such misgivings miss the point, I believe).

Anyway, I read three extravagantly rotten poems -- 'The Steel-Workers' Proposal for the Decommissioning of Beaubourg', 'Bent Pony' and one from 'Meet the Spork Valley All-Stars' -- and you can listen to them below. Cut out the above picture of me, attach it to a pencil, and bob it about a bit, and it'll be just like a front-row seat.





I've been blessed of late with a lucky streak of nice gigs. In fact, Easter egg two is the print version of 'The Forest and the Field', the lecture I gave at the University of Cambridge English Faculty as part of the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival on March 13th.

'The Forest and the Field' -- for basically anecdotal reasons I won't go into now -- uses Shakespeare, and in particular the figures of Gonzalo in The Tempest and Feste in Twelfth Night, as, respectively, entry and exit points for a consideration of the conceptual spaces to which theatre artists have traditionally had recourse, and the fundamental shift over the last forty years in the social context in which those spaces are conceived: a shift which I take to require the adventurous imagining of new kinds of space, and new modes of work to occupy them -- modes whose principal features I end by trying, inadequately, to sketch.

To anyone who reads this blog, there will not be much that's new in 'The Forest and the Field' other than the Shakespearean lens through which the ideas of liminality and subjunctivity are topically examined. Nonetheless, as a summary of how my thinking within theatre has developed in the last few years and where it's got to as of March 2008, I'm sufficiently pleased with the paper to be keen to share it here, in the hope of some helpful feedback or of its being useful to somebody somewhere. The post-match response at the festival was exceedingly generous and encouraging; I was especially happy to know that the whole thing stimulated some worthwhile thoughts within the already scarily teeming interior of Keston Sutherland, who, wildly beyond my expectations, was able to attend. As the paper quotes at length a recent essay of his, it was a pleasure to be able to share with him the line of thought, or the frame of inquiry perhaps, that he's inspired in my work this year.

Anyway, you're welcome to download the .pdf of 'The Forest and the Field' here, and if you want to talk about anything in it, feel free to drop me a line.

The performance part of the evening was a blast. My own contribution was, in the end, not at all as advertised; I'd been making a piece called 'Today This Is There', the authorship of which was entirely automated, and though on paper the parameters for the piece were interesting, I finally had to admit to myself, at about 10pm on the evening before the gig, that the material that had actually been generated was basically extremely dull. So I junked it, and pulled out of the vaults instead a piece called 'O Vienna', which was published a while back at Alison Croggon's brilliant Masthead. Though it reads like a long (and not especially well-written) poem, 'O Vienna' is a score for performance, so the text itself is designed to be interpreted -- say by a dancer or a live artist -- rather than recited; but with so little notice I unfortunately couldn't rustle up a likely performer: so instead I decided to pull together a soundscore which I hoped would at least present some tonal variation beneath the enigmatic surfaces of the text. The consequent late night and early morning very nearly met in the middle, but I was quite pleased with the result: it was nice to read something very slowly and very close to a mic, and the sound worked out well. I still wish there'd been a Theron or a Jamie or someone carving out a performative response to the text as it rolled, but I think it was ok without. Certainly better than 'Today This Is There' would have been, at any rate, so we'll call that a result.

The remainder of the evening's programme promised two gourmet treats: Mischa Twitchin and Tom Lyall's Figments (from Beckett's 'Company'), and unfolding king lear a model by the evening's curator, Jeremy Hardingham.

I've known Jeremy since university: he happened to be a friend of my then-neighbour Tim (who's now doing something I absolutely 100% don't understand a word of, but which I imagine is giddyingly well-paid, in the US) -- but I dare say our paths would have crossed anyway before long. I mention this Cambridge connection not -- or not merely -- to nauseate, but because the awesome bravado of Jeremy's student work was at the time -- and to a considerable degree remains -- a beacon for very many of those then-emerging theatre-makers who saw it or who were fortunate enough to participate in it. The list of those in the latter category is, through present eyes, very remarkable: in fact, the first show I made under the Signal to Noise company name, The Consolations, was entirely cast from actors who had worked on Jeremy's extraordinarily complex and ambitious (and successful) Edinburgh production Incarnate two years previously: Gemma Brockis, Tom Lyall, Rajni Shah, Theron Schmidt, and Stefan Warhaftig, as well as Hardingham himself. This was not by design, but nor was it a coincidence; if there's one tendency of Jeremy's that I'm bold enough to presume to say I share, it's an eye for interesting actors. The reverberation of those early projects still seems to me distinctly in the air, to the extent that I still think of Jeremy as a crucially important presence in the ecology of London theatre, even though it's some years since he's lived and worked here: a geiger counter modified to detect traces of his influence would have been clicking away like Epileptic Flipper at Shunt's Dance Bear Dance or (Incarnate alumnus) Simon Kane's Jonah Non Grata -- and, I suspect, d.v., in my own forthcoming ...SISTERS too. At the same time, there's something so vitally and almost harrowingly sui generis about Jeremy's work that, on encountering it first hand, one quickly concludes that the idea of anything outside it being "a bit like it" is preposterous. Watching unfolding king lear a model, I'm reminded only, really, of Jeremy's own student production of King Lear, I guess twelve years ago, which remains, in all its haunting and upsetting grotesquerie, by a mile the best Lear I've ever seen.

For the last couple of years, Hardingham has been 'managing' the new black-box studio at the Faculty of English at Cambridge: which position has enabled him to do two things he obviously relishes: firstly, creating opportunities for students (in which role it's obvious that, like Keston Sutherland at Sussex, he is, with little fanfare and no whit of overweening self-promotion, radically changing lives); secondly, trying to use the resources at his disposal to support professional artists. (I noticed for example a development credit for Hardingham and the Judith E. Wilson Studio in the programme of Ridiculsmus's Tough Time, Nice Time.) This post has opened up a certain amount of space for his own artistic work, too, though I suspect in a similar vein to my experience at CPT: in other words, a huge amount of operating room in principle, massively constrained in practice by the other demands of the job. unfolding king lear a model is at any rate the most extended and most fully realised piece of Jeremy's I've seen in several years. (More extended than perhaps either of us anticipated: billed to run 28 minutes, it in fact came in close to an hour; as far as anyone in the audience, I think, was concerned, he'd have been welcome to go on twice as long again.)

unfolding king lear a model is a solo in which Hardingham seems to be, at one and the same time, chewing and regurgitating King Lear, in a sort of terrible parody of circular breathing techniques. Some of the text is retained, and external fragments interpolated, as if spoken from a redacted transcript in which some stray papers have become mixed up and almost everything explicit has been obliterated by an oversolicitous and weirdly erratic censor. At one point I have the odd experience of recognizing a fragment of text from one of the pieces Jeremy and I made together some years ago as a duo called COAT: and I realise I don't know where that particular phrase came from in the first place -- I had always assumed he wrote it, but now I'm not sure. Is it perhaps even in King Lear somewhere? There is a sense in Jeremy, not only in this piece but between all his works and across whatever membrane he or I might in a moment of weakness visualize separating his life and his writing, of a huge, unceasing, autophagous intertextual churn, in which individual voice and authority are disassembled: not indiscriminately, in some callow mulching of 'high' and 'low' culture, but so as to mimic the ways in which information within those cultures is transmitted, sometimes preserved, sometimes lost entirely or at best lost in translation. In this turbulent field -- one might almost say minefield -- Jeremy skips and tumbles and flees his own shadow, negotiating its pitfalls and overleaping its ha-has and feigning the occasional stumble: it's the Z-Boys mix of precision and (real, not simulated) spontaneity, but also a kind of convulsive ingenuity that seems far from recreational and resembles more nearly a hypertextual restyling of the flight-or-fight impulse, a nervously contemporary survival tactic.

As ever with Jeremy's work there is an odd sense of danger -- the intermixing on his crowded props table of sheet glass and hammers, of water and electricity -- which persists despite my certain knowledge that, at his best, his work always feels like that, and in over a decade I've never known him actually put himself or his audience in anything like the danger that he evokes. The visual styling of his presence is a rough-and-ready mix of world-war aviator and cyberpunk: in this, as in his language, there are obvious traces of Beckett and Beuys and Artaud, and possibly Kantor (I wonder). Visually and aurally there is an awesomely deft choreography of layers, particularly striking in this instance in his use of music and sound, which is more sophisticated here than I've identified in his work before. Again it is the complexity, not as styling but as argument, that ultimately is moving and impressive and jags in the mind: for all the ferociousness of his inquiry into language and object and abstraction and absence, as ever his work is alive with the essentially theatrical discovery of how the individual, buffeted (as Lear is) by what seem to be malign extraneities, contains and embodies all the graces and desolations of properly collective response, and spells out in poetry and grunting the massed chorus of aloneness. It's the best work I've seen Jeremy do in many years; at the time, there's no way of saying so. Finally this blog has a purpose.

In such a context, Mischa and Tom's superbly achieved Beckett piece inevitably seems a bit precious in the sleekness and smallness of its control, authored several times over. The elements -- extremely precisely and localised lighting set within profound darkness; voices, live and on tape, speaking the upscale (though sometimes leftover) texts of the classic European avant garde; the solo actor's body reduced to one element or set of elements -- here, a pair of feet, walking and not walking; the sort of discordant music you might associate with eastern European animation of the kind that sustained BBC2 through many a Sunday afternoon back in the day -- where on earth does Mischa find these CDs of atonal thumbtack piano? -- are consistent with the development of Twitchin's work for as long as I've been watching it. The plangent, humorous articulacy of Lyall's feet, walking and pausing in their long, thin beam of light -- a beam very like a gymnast's, come to think of it -- is, unsurprisingly, remarkable and quite captivating; the cadences of individual sections within the piece are faultlessly shaped. I like and admire this work and I'm glad it's happening, but it also feels utterly at odds with the vision I'd been describing in my lecture only a few hours before. Mischa's response to the crisis in theatre (I think he's only liked four things in all the time I've known him) is to shore up the walls of its protective artificiality, and make that aspect total and all-enveloping. I'm going to have to get used to thinking harder about this, as it's the response of several artists I greatly admire, Mischa not least among them: but what it creates, quite antithetically to the exhiliration that Jeremy's work educes (for me at least), is a kind of presentation that's no more 'live' than a Rembrandt on a gallery wall. The bit I need to think harder about is that, of course, among the compelling features of a Rembrandt on a gallery wall, quite often, is how live it feels, after all that.

The next few weeks are going to be full of this quite searching kind of thinking -- at least, I hope they will, it kind of depends on my biorhythms... I suspect the spell I've had over the past couple of months of feeling near the top of my game may be in its decline now, if my efforts in the last few days (including this post) are anything to go by. Hopefully I can find some reserves. The next couple of weeks are focused on 'An Apparently Closed Room', which is a truly exciting thought, not least because Theron and I have more divergent views now than I've been aware of us having before about the job of performance within theatre, and these perspectives are at the heart of our present enquiry into the form and content of this piece: in other words, they're about to stop being theoretical positions. Following that, I'll be introducing 'The Field, The Stream, The Building' to the Rose Bruford symposium -- which will partly entail transcribing the long and complicated (and consistently fascinating) (and ultimately exhausting) conversation that some practitioner friends and I had last weekend about the meaning of theatre 'space'. And then I'll be getting stuck into preparation for ...SISTERS, which, given that it's probably going to mean a stab at writing a version myself, will not be a walk in the park. At least I know that there are going to be plenty of people in that rehearsal room who are brighter and braver than me and will help me make the piece I've imagined making rather than the one I currently feel capable of directing.



One last egg from the bunny's basket: (and how often one finds oneself writing that...):

I've finally updated the playlist in the Gevorts Box juke-unit over to the right of your screen (and up a bit). I'll post the track listing separately below. It's the customary mix of new stuff (Xiu Xiu, Stephen Malkmus), recent favourites (Idiot Pilot, Connan & the Mockasins), old friends (Pansy Division, Sun Ra), new discoveries of older work (Paul Lansky, Duke Payne), children's tv (The Swing Bach Ensemble), scatology (Holly & Jessica), lunatics (The Legendary Stardust Cowboy), and six-year-olds (the intrepid lead vocalist of creepy infants band The Death Killers). All topped and tailed with a special bonus of two Easter-related tracks by the Tiger Lillies to make you gag on your Creme Egg.

One unexpected outcome of compiling this Gevorts Box update was that in seeking new mashups with which to amuse you (I'm exceedingly happily to have stumbled across DJ M.i.F. aka DJ M. Aynot Feed's blissful 'Get Ur Typewriter On'), I accidentally and rather disappointingly resolved a curiosity from Hippo World Guest Book. If you saw that show, you may remember an entry from the splendidly-named Annatashera Beaverhousend ("kiss kiss kiss"), who wanted to "pleasure" herself with a hippo named Paul Linbourne. Well, so, the collection from which I lifted 'Get Ur Typewriter On' also features a track by 'Anastasia Beaverhausen', of which our beloved colleague Annatashera is obviously an inadvertent mangling; and a little dismayed Googling later, it turns out that Anastasia Beaverhausen is an alias used by the character Karen in the basically hateful US sitcom Will & Grace. Here, for example, is a scene from the show featuring both the name in question and a preternaturally sleazy Rip Torn in cameo mode. So, yeah, I mean, it's not like I was holding out much hope that anybody really was called Annatashera Beaverhousend, but I'm still a little crestfallen that she has such dreary origins. Another good reason to retire from Hippo World, I think. Though I still hope Paul Linbourne is real.

Anyway, despite that downer, enjoy the tunes -- and if you like anything in there and it's commercially available, don't forget the polite thing to do would be to buy it -- or at least tell other people about it...

That is all. Happy Easter, if you want it.

Gevorts Box Easter egg special: tracklisting

A little something for everyone, thus:

Bonus track: The Tiger Lillies: 'Banging in the Nails' from The Brothel to the Cemetery
1. DJ M. Aynot Feed: 'Get Ur Typewriter On'
2. Idiot Pilot: 'Red Museum' from Wolves
3. Katzenjammers: 'Cars' from Tom Middleton presents Crazy Covers vol. 2
4. Connan & the Mockasins: 'Sneaky Sneaky Dogfriend' (7")
5. Austin Coleman with Joe Washington Brown & Group: 'I Feel Like Dyin' In This Army' from Negro Religious Field Recordings from Louisiana, Mississippi & Tennessee, 1934-1942, vol.1
6. BBC Radiophonic Workshop: 'Scene & Heard' from Fourth Dimension
7. DSL: 'Invaders' (7")
8. Xiu Xiu w/ Michael Gira: 'Under Pressure' from Women as Lovers
9. Sun Ra: 'Disco 2100' from Sun Ra: The Singles
10. Laura Barrett: 'Robot Ponies' from the EP Earth Sciences
11. Paul Lansky: 'notjustmoreidlechatter' from More Than Idle Chatter
12. The Death Killers: 'Why Does the Purple Dog Sing?'
13. Pansy Division: 'Jackson' from Pile Up
14. The Legendary Stardust Cowboy: 'Shadow of a Tiger' from Rock-It To Stardom
15. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: 'Gardenia' from Real Emotional Trash
16. The Swing Bach Ensemble: 'Prima Ballerina (Theme from 'Watch')' from Girl in a Suitcase
17. Holly & Jessica: 'Poo in my Mouth' from Holly & Jessica (CD-R)
18. Duke Payne: 'The Bottom'
19. A.L. Lloyd: 'One Night As I Lay On My Bed' from England and her Traditional Songs
20. King Creosote: 'I'll Fly By The Seat Of My Pants' from KC Rules OK
Bonus track: The Tiger Lillies: 'Green Hill' from Death and the Bible


Note: as ever, if you own the copyright in any of these tracks and would like it to be removed from the Gevorts Box playlist, please contact me.

Found proverb

"People with brain injuries can't catch buses."

(source: 'File on 4', BBC Radio 4, about 45 minutes ago.)

Un p'tit rien de rien du tout

Apologies for dormancy. I'm just back from an intensive writing week, which went really well. There's something perversely -- and I mean perversely -- enjoyable about harrumphing in these pages about text-based theatre, and then stealing off like a thief in the night to spend a week by the coast writing a play. How dirty. ...Actually it's also quite a filthy play, so the whole thing is quite beyond the pale. Look at the muck in here, etc. No more details as yet -- not quite sure how under wraps the project is, and am very slowly learning to err on the side of discretion... But will post more as & when.

On which topic, I've updated a few details in the 'meatspace' section to the right concerning upcoming stuff. Maybe see one or two of you in Cambridge this Thursday?; the lineup for the performance bit also includes Mischa Twitchin & Tom Lyall doing stuff from Beckett, and a couple of pieces by mein host Jeremy Hardingham. Exciting prospects all. My performance will be a first live encounter with a piece that's automatically constructing itself in the background as I write this; could be very stupid indeed, might be sporadically interesting, perhaps a bit of both. It's a test run for something that I'm then going to be turning into a piece for Martin Williams's sound art project for Resonance FM, 'All Day Everyday' -- a series of 15 minute reflections on "the beauty and banality ever-present in the everyday", which runs for the next several weeks at 5.45pm on Wednesdays. This week is Julia Lee Barclay's cut-up piece "Future Worlds: Tricorn Init!", about which I heard great things when she presented it live during Apocryphal's recent weeklong residency at Lorem Ipsum in Hackney. Future programmes will feature work by David Grubbs, Stan's Cafe, Richard Youngs, a smith, Wolf, Brandon LaBelle, Melanie Wilson and others: so I'm in highly-esteemed company and will try not to eat my (metaphorical) fondant fancy in an unpleasant and childish way.

Busy times here at La Casa de Thompson. ...SISTERS continues to come together slowly, the cast is 83.3% in place and conversations about design are well underway and it's all pretty exciting. Rehearsals for that start seven weeks today & I can't wait to get stuck in. But between now and then I'm going to be: doing the Cambridge gig; advancing my work on the project I'm doing with Rose Bruford College, working up to a seminar presentation with Dennis Cooper at the college's symposium in April; spending some time with a young emerging company called Shady Dolls whose work looks very intriguing and who are starting to put together a new show called An Ornery Tale...; reading/performing at the Klinker in Stoke Newington (see right) -- not sure what yet; and spending some intensive time working with Theron Schmidt on our project An Apparently Closed Room, which is currently taking some interesting turns and which remains one of the most personally exciting and challenging projects in the mix at the moment. So that feels, um, ample. And there are some big bits of work coming up later in the year and in the early part of next year which I'll make a fuss about as we go along, obviously.

One last tiresome throb of the self-promotional impulse requires that I mention I have a piece on queer theatre in the new edition of Total Theatre Magazine, and I'm pretty pleased with it, given the limited scope of a double-page magazine spread and the need to remain comparatively lucid throughout. Eventually I guess I'll probably post the text here, along with the text of the lecture I'm trying out in Cambridge this week (in which Shakespeare invents post-liminal theatre); but don't wait for that -- if you don't already subscribe to Total Theatre it's worth a look, not just for my modest contributions (I have a review in there also of the last ChoppedLogic show). It's a vastly improved magazine, I think, on where it was when I first started reading it seven or eight years ago.

Well, my dears, that's a pretty unseemly post, all told, but I've hardly seen or done anything since I was last here, other than work on the stuff I've just been talking about. So it goes, at the moment. Next time I'll try to think of something atrocious to say, but for now, let's leave the cat and the pigeons engaged in their own separate affairs, and we'll all make do with these few paltry vanilla paragraphs until we meet again -- if not in Cambridge (this Thursday) or at the Klinker (next Wednesday) then soon, I hope, and with all guns blazing.

Meh, just some reviews

Yeah, uh, forgive the uncharacteristically lacklustre post title. Just doing a little Clinton camp shuffle to downplay expectations, now that it seems I am being worshipped as a god. ...Weeeeelll, these things happen. (*pitch-shifts voice down an octave*)

Not much to report, except that I've made a few updates to the blogroll and links list to your right (special commendatory rosette goes to Michael Buitron's wildly smart Leap Into the Void), and flagged up a few upcoming dates on which I will be descending from Olympus to, like, read at the Klinker in Stoke Newington and stuff.

OK, here's what I thought of some shows I saw. Enjoy. Or, whatever. Endure. If you can. If not, there's always Fancy Pants Adventures.




Jerome Bel: Showtime 1994-2005
Sadlers Wells

Whenever retrospective seasons are mounted, they're often described as 'overdue', sometimes 'long overdue'. I mention this only because one of the great things about this survey of theatre works by the French performance maker Jerome Bel was how precisely 'due' it seemed, how timely. Bel may be only in early mid-career but this account of his work comes at just the right moment, both in terms of the development of (this phase of) his own creative practice and in relation to his burgeoning significance and widening influence on the language and the conceptual underwriting of a whole tendency of European and British work. As I said when I posted last November in anticipation of this season, frustratingly I was compelled to be out of town for the middle weekend, which featured some key works including what has come to be seen as perhaps Bel's signature piece, The Show Must Go On. However, as the programme across its three weeks was chronologically organized, the pieces I was able to see are from each end of the decade spanned by the season, and this in part was one of the most interesting aspects of the experience I had.

The last time I wrote about Bel here, I described him as "Frenchest living person". Facetious, of course (though there's some mild truth in it: even at 43, he really could still be one of the schoolboy gang-members in Goscinny & Sempe's Le Petit Nicolas...), but I can at least unpack what I mean partly in terms of the work. It is more interested in ideas than feelings. It wants to display and consider signs, not give vent to (or rise to) emotions. Its humour is detached, logical, bureaucratic even, rather than effusive or chaotic: it is about not intervening, about throwing attention away. It is surfacey, but not superficial; languagey but not literary. In the earlier works particularly, I find myself thinking a lot about the OuLiPo, about the likes of Queneau and Perec for whom the phantom authority of the system and the machine are more interesting and ultimately more revealing about human relation and response than are expressionism and the jaggedness of high modernism. (I had thought there was an official OuDaPo as part of OuXPo but I'm unable to discover whether that's true.) Play is serious, a philosophical engagement, a political crucible.

It's the earliest section of the earliest work here, Nom Donne par l'Auteur, which most obviously exemplifies these characteristics. Bel and collaborator Frederic Seguette bring a small number of objects -- football, hairdryer, table salt, torch, vacuum cleaner, dictionary, and so on; and themselves; and four large capital letters, N, O, S, E, with which to mark compass points -- out on to the stage. In the brilliantly successful first section, sitting opposite each other, the two performers each hold up one object, placing them together in a temporary and provisional pair, and then put them down again and move to another combination. Simple as that. As one 'reads' each pair, making sense of the relationships that are implied -- which may be very formal or abstract at one moment, much more instrumental or free-associative the next -- one starts to become enthralledly aware of the immensely complex mesh of systems in which each object participates, the vast number of categories by which each may be classified and reconstrued. The exercise quickly becomes funny not merely because it is absurd but because it is revelatory and delightful -- in other words, it is not in denial of meaning but in awe of the uncontainable proliferation of meaning -- and the deadpan presentation finds a beautifully supple tension between mock-seriousness and actual seriousness. A similar exercise occurs in 'Dimensions of Dialogue', one of Jan Svankmajer's greatest animated shorts: but Bel makes it more spacious and less mordant. This sequence gives way to others that develop the same ideas more fully, more freely, but never, to my mind, quite so effectively. There is certainly a choreographer's eye for the dynamics of implicit movement within forms, and a highly restrained and impacted wit, in evidence throughout; but the more elaborate it becomes, the less it entertains -- the less, in other words, it holds us together. At a couple of puzzling points there is some appallingly flat-footed (deliberately so, I assume) physical comedy, like a novice's first pass at Slapstick for Dummies. The piece is at its best when the performers are readiest to present themselves simply as other objects in an array that constantly twirls before us like a mobile over an infant's cot. It's when the objects themselves are the actors -- as in Fischli & Weiss's A Quiet Afternoon and Der Lauf der Dinge -- that the unthinkable complexity of human creativity is most appealingly signalled.

Nom Donne par l'Auteur is hardly sumptuous in its staged world, but Jerome Bel, from the following year, pursues Bel's desire for a kind of tabula rasa to an even more radical set of resources. Three performers, naked (and, ultimately, a fourth, clothed); one light onstage; the back wall; a small CD player; a chalk and a lipstick; and, unless I'm forgetting something, that's all. Bel having explained subsequently how this piece arises from an attempt to answer, honestly and rigorously, what are the necessary components for a dance piece to take place, the most startling part of his apparatus is exactly not his use of nudity, which is absolutely correct (and on which, needless to say, much of the banal notoriety of this piece rests), but rather the two writing implements. More or less the first act that happens in the piece is the chalking on the back wall of the names of the participants, starting with THOMAS EDISON (who kindly contributed the electric light) and STRAVINSKY, IGOR (who composed The Rite of Spring, which plays very quietly and feebly in the background throughout much of the piece) and continuing with the names of the performers; the lipstick is used to make marks and write words on the performers' bodies. Initially these written elements seem puzzling -- how can they be considered even arguably fundamental to an act of dance? But it seems to me what they actually do is stand in, at a slight remove but not quite a metaphor's breadth, for the presence of the audience. Again, it is their reading acts, their willingness to pay a kind of interrogative attention to what Bel is presenting here, and in particular their readiness to allow one reading to be erased and supplanted by another, that allows this piece its vital generativity. So we sit in our seats, imaginatively 'labelling' and identifying what we see; Bel simply wants to meet us in the act of these taxonomic interventions and disrupt them a little: most obviously, though in practice not as stridently as it perhaps sounds, when some of the chalk wall writings are partly rubbed out using the performers' own (freshly produced) urine. In a bravura closing sequence, these erasures eventually reveal the sentence "ERIC CHANTE STING" (that 'Sting' turning out to be why "Stravinsky, Igor" has to be written surname first), at which point, the fourth performer -- Eric -- arrives on-stage and sings all through "Englishman in New York": supremely ludic, charming, possibly slightly disturbing in what it suggests about the power of staged language to create real events.

Two things bug me about Jerome Bel, both of which I am more than prepared to imagine are intended by the director. Firstly, the bulk of the piece is enacted by just two of the performers, a woman (Claire Haenni) and a man (Seguette again); the third, an older, 'overweight' woman, is mostly required to sit or lie on the floor, facing away from the audience, holding the lantern. It struck me as odd and kind of unfortunate that a piece which aimed to create an unusually direct and candid encounter with 'the body', stripped of irrelevant and interferent connotations, should nonetheless re-enact the marginalization -- more or less literally -- of a body that happens to fall into categories that we have habitual trouble looking at: the old and the fat. I desperately don't want to reproduce the kind of huffy commentary that Bel so often attracts -- "I suppose he must be making a point but I didn't get what it was" -- but I would certainly be interested to know what was behind that decision.

Secondly -- and this is a larger issue and more to do with personal taste, I suppose -- it bothers me that so much of Jerome Bel is fixed on a kind of (perfectly gentle and not unhumorous) exploration of the bathos of the unclothed body. Fair enough to want to get away from the idea of the "perfect" (dancer's) body, or from unexamined notions of eroticism or second-hand codes of sensuality. But the slightly disingenuous play here with the imperfections of the body, the contours of fat that can be traced around even these pretty good-looking physiques, the rudimentary 'puppetry of the penis' moments with which Seguette presents us, the fascination with freckles and stray hairs and pot-bellies... this feels like a corrective agenda rather than a balanced account. I certainly wouldn't align myself with those who insist that Jerome Bel isn't dance or is not worth watching (or making in the first place); but I felt from early on that I was yearning for an honest acceptance of a slightly more artful beauty. (Anything that smacked too much of poise was immediately mocked or undermined.) It seems every bit as fundamental to our experience of bodies -- our own or each other's -- that beauty and lyricism and elegance are not merely dubious aspects of some remote and alienating virtuosity; we see them right next to us in our friends, our lovers, our kids, if not in ourselves. Even someone with as disastrous and horrifying a body as mine -- I'm not sure I'd even be allowed to hold the lantern -- knows that it's still capable of expressing joy or tenderness or anger or excitement or sexual desire, in an instant, more readily and more accurately than, say, my writing can. I completely understand why Bel would want to start over from zero, and it's important not only for him but for all of us that in Jerome Bel he does so; nonetheless, it seems to me that a big part of the aesthetic here is not merely confrontation of the unadorned and unconditional body but actually overshooting into a kind of wilful self-denial. I don't mean mere restraint or discipline or an aversion to careless indulgence; I mean a kind of stupefied denial of the variousness of the self as it reveals itself through the body. Which, even as a transitional commitment, seems to me an ideologically problematic strategy, to say the least.

Regrettably (at least in some ways) I don't know what happens in Bel's practice immediately after Jerome Bel wipes the slate clean (albeit with piss); the only other piece I was able to see is the much more recent Pichet Klunchun and Myself. What was good about the big forward leap, I suppose, for me, was being able to see a clear development in the director's aesthetic and philosophy -- like skipping ahead to the last chapter in a book, I suppose, to find out the denouement. What I found was a truly heartening and inspiring advance in which Bel's penchant for candour and transparency and the refusal of performative seclusion is retained, but its articulation is delicate, humane and deeply suggestive. The piece puts the two eponymous artists, the classical Thai dancer Klunchun and Bel himself, on-stage together, seated in chairs mostly, facing each other, discussing their respective practices. For the first hour, Bel interviews Klunchun; for the remaning forty minutes, Klunchun asks questions of Bel. Klunchun demonstrates different aspects of Khon, the classical form to which he has dedicated his working life; he teaches Bel a little. Bel demonstrates some of his signature moves to Klunchun: the first two -- standing still, watching the audience; and essaying the sort of vague, half-hearted, rooted-to-the-spot handbag dancing that the participants in The Show Must Go On are inclined towards -- are utterly baffling and disappointing to Klunchun; the third, in which Bel slowly "dies" to Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly", reminds him of his own mother's death, and moves and touches him in a quite unexpected way.

It is difficult to say why this piece is so successful and so beautiful, though that in itself is probably one of the reasons. There is much to enjoy in both the mutual incomprehension and the odd details that nonetheless connect these two practices; Klunchun's Khon demonstrations are awesomely beautiful (particularly in a brief vignette where he portrays a woman receiving notice of the death of her husband, with unbelievable economy and poise), and the explanatory commentary is full of interesting stuff; it is great also to hear Bel talking in such down-to-earth terms about the theoretical base of different aspects of his practice. (Particularly great given that I completely forgot about the pre-performance talk that Bel was giving and for which I had diligently booked.) His account of why he refuses to refund money to disappointed audiences is the most concise and compelling defence of, and argument for, genuinely experimental theatre that I've ever heard. It is slightly odd to think that they have performed this piece a number of times, making the 'liveness' of their conversation seem like a bit of sophisticated fakery to begin with, though I quickly forgot about this -- I guess they merely have a framework to move through, anyway, and much of the apparent spontaneity and occasional confusion is genuine, or nearly genuine. I suspect what we see is an edited reenactment of a conversation or series of conversations that, at some point, they really did have: and therefore, what we see in their dialogue is, at worst, brilliantly well-done verbatim theatre. For me, though, the closing moments are the real clincher. Klunchun brings to an abrupt end a dialogue about the use of nudity in Jerome Bel, when Bel threatens to drop his trousers and demonstrate a moment from that piece; the ensuing minute or so of the conversation, which touches cursorily on attitudes to sex and nudity in their respective cultures, proceeds bumpily and ends with Bel -- and all of us in the audience -- tacitly implicated in the tourist-driven colonisation of Klunchun's culture, about which the two men have talked sympathetically and at length earlier in the piece. There is an uncomfortable two seconds of silence. "Do you want to ask me anything else?" asks Bel. "No," replies Klunchun. "Shall we stop then?" "Yes." And that's that. This jarringly uneasy ending superbly reframes the whole of the conversation that we've just witnessed, in far more politically activated terms; the whole platform on which their intercultural conversation has been staged is thrown into question. The sudden lack of resolution is a brilliant coup de theatre, which perfectly encapsulates the luminously sophisticated blend of theory and showmanship that Bel offers any engaged and open-minded audience.



Tanztheater Wuppertal: The Rite of Spring / Cafe Muller
Sadlers Wells

Straight into another highpoint in this exceptional Sadlers Wells season, with my first sighting of Tanztheater Wuppertal since 1995, when they brought to Edinburgh the extraordinary Nelken, a piece that somehow managed to feel both remote and overwhelming. In fact my first exposure to Pina Bausch's work came with happening across a documentary a couple of years earlier -- probably a South Bank Show, from back in the day when serious arts programming on terrestrial tv wasn't necessarily a contradiction in terms -- the most memorable part of which was a clip from Cafe Muller, of which I have consequently been wanting to see the full version ever since.

Bausch is as German as Jerome Bel is French, and it is perhaps the ravishingly desolate Cafe Muller that best sums up her aesthetic: stylish, bleak, weird (in the strictest sense), and suffused with a pain so intense that it continually takes off into the ecstatic or sinks into the absurdly comic. (And Bausch really does do absurdity, in a way that seems both cruel and charming.) The piece places a small group of isolated individuals in a chic, melancholic cafe, and watches them collide but fail to connect, as if they were so many malfunctioning clockwork toys, bouncing witlessly off the walls, tottering crazily about, and yet seemingly lost in private arias of grief and longing. The figure I find most heartbreaking is a thin, elegant woman who haunts the periphery of the cafe, apparently unseen by anyone else; this presumably is the role that Bausch herself was advertised to play, though injury or indisposition sadly prevented it the night I was there. The music, when there is music, is from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and the sequence, about halfway through, set to Dido's Lament, which for the first time brings most of the characters into the room at the same time, is as beautiful and clever a piece of theatre choreography as I've seen in a long time, and what's particularly striking about it is that I can't really think of anyone on the contemporary scene who would dare to use such nakedly solemn music without once undercutting it. Yes, there are moments of idiosyncratic humour, but these only extend the searching movements of the sadness, rather than relieving it or offering any consolation.

The same is true, on a larger scale, of Bausch's legendary The Rite of Spring, which was her first major work as a choreographer. Fascinating, of course, to see it so soon after Bel's (apparently) almost satirical use of the same score for his Jerome Bel, a work which in most respects couldn't be much more different from Bausch's: and, furthermore, having seen at the end of last year Michael Clark's Mmm..., which went out of its way to have a characteristically sassy kind of fun with Stravinsky's Rite. What distinguishes Bausch's approach to the score is her courage, the unstinting fidelity to Stravinsky's vision: she is determined not to look away. Again, there is no undercutting, no wink to the audience. In that sense, and from this distance, Bausch's Rite seems to belong to a different era, to be oddly backward-looking in some ways: certainly its opening, in particular, seems to refer at moments to the angularity and flatness of Nijinsky's original. There is nothing but modernity powering Bausch's vision of the Rite but also a total application to the challenges posed by the score and its embedded narrative, where more recent choreographers might be satisfied to further problematize that task or to (appear to) disregard or evade the pressure of inheritance. Though Bausch's choreography here is nothing short of marvellous -- particularly when she's moving the whole corps at once, and especially when that movement is fractured by the complex bar-to-bar timeshifts in the score -- there is no doubt that, compared with the much more recent and perhaps more topically effective reading offered by her protege Raimond Hoghe in his astoundingly minimal and literally terrifying Sacre, this Rite seems a little removed from us now, just slightly slipping away from a savagery and a cogency that I suspect it would have delivered even ten years ago.

Perhaps, then, the sensational information in these works is slowly dissipating as time passes and the influence of Bausch's innovations becomes absorbed by a second new generation of dance-theatre makers, almost all of whom are certainly aware of their debt to this extraordinary artist. For myself I would have to regretfully confess that, particularly with Cafe Muller, I found it awfully difficult to stay tuned in, not because the work bored or repelled me in any way -- in fact quite the opposite: I found myself so stimulated by it and by my personal analysis of her authorial choices as it was unfolding, that I had to keep reminding myself to focus on the piece itself, rather than on the high-octane daydreaming it precipitated in me. But that's just how it goes these days -- I can't remember the last time I was overwhelmed by a piece in the way that Nelken captivated and engrossed (and sometimes bored and repelled) me over a decade ago, because I can't quite stop myself doing this bloody reverse engineering job on what I'm watching (at least, if it's any good). What I do find remarkable still about Bausch, and enviable, is precisely that ability to stare, unblinkingly, into the void, or the fire, or the picture of cruelty. It is extraordinary; and given that the options for evasion, for looking away, for protecting the gaze with a veil of critical theory, are not necessarily dishonourable and often actually pertinent, it will perhaps become rarer, in the next few years at least.



Women of Troy
National Theatre

That said, there is a very similar, and in some ways even more brutally productive, commitment to the unsparing and the unswerving in Katie Mitchell and Don Taylor's account of Women of Troy at the National. One advantage of having left it so late in the run -- a product, I'm ashamed to say, of a slightly kneejerk aversion to Mitchell's work which it's taken me a little while to talk myself out of, causing me to miss her Waves and Attempts on her Life, both of which I dare say I would have benefited from seeing -- was that I was able to go in having just that weekend read Mitchell's short piece in the Tanztheater Wuppertal programme, in which she acknowledges, with great warmth and generosity, the influence that Pina Bausch has had on her own work. And I'm pretty pleased to say it's quite obviously there!: not merely in the presentation of the women themselves -- their evening dress and high heels, their clinging to rituals of making-up and odd vestiges of social dancing -- but also in what felt like a fierce refusal to allow any of the surface features of the production or occasional hints of modishness to offer a diversion from the agonies of fear and sorrow with which the whole piece is gripped. Again, there are odd moments of humour -- particularly in Taylor's fine text -- which arise, as they do in Bausch, mostly out of the stupidity of the body and the addled daftness of the brain as both simply glance off the impenetrable mass of grief which each of the characters contains (and can only hope to contain).

One of the more minor problems I had with Mitchell's dismal Dream Play, the last production of hers that I saw, recurs here: which is that the internal moulding of the piece -- especially in moving between what appear to be separately conceived sections, above all those that are founded on one particular image -- does not always feel secure. I think I'm probably oversensitive to this because I have big problems with it too: the work appears too episodic, particularly when there are no changes of location to help the sense of flow or of foreground/background. Some images become too exposed, too vulnerable in the operations of the piece, too open to that ghastly ungraspable charge of appearing 'studenty', simply because (to be a bit blunt) they belong to the director and the company rather than to the play. There is also an indistinct quality to the movement at times, particularly when the sense of present drama has to be sustained through some very long and involuted speeches. What this does create, though -- along with the similarly unclear speaking, which drew some of the early (and eventually drowned-out) criticism of the production -- is an awful sense of how beyond these women is the terrible scale of their predicament, how even the loftiest of them, being only human, is dwarfed by it.

I liked very much a slightly jarringly ingenious device by which, through some cleverly designed light and sound, the 'fourth wall' opens up like a hatch door to allow the chorus to speak directly to the audience; I was grateful for it particularly because its first use came just as I was beginning to feel anxious about the preposterousness of the actual event -- slight intimations of 'shouting at night', I'm afraid. Having the women at least from time to time able to acknowledge us, and rather painfully cut off from us the rest of the time, I thought worked superbly well. Other features praised by earlier critics (and friends who saw it early on) did not impress me so much: for a start, the production seems to have changed quite substantially since it was in preview, so there was some stuff that, as it were, never turned up. The almost ghostly, weirdly disconnected dancing that recurs at moments throughout is clearly a fascinating idea, and (aside from the slight cavil above about the transition into and out of passages at what seem to be slightly different levels of 'reality') it's mostly bad luck that they didn't work so well for me: this seems a poor excuse for failing to be moved by something, but there we are: the music that accompanied those moments, the first few bars of Ives's 'The Unanswered Question', I've used twice in shows of my own -- to accompany climactic sequences of a very different flavour in The Consolations and, more recently, Escapology: so the deep association of that music with entirely different propositions was, inevitably, rather estranging for me. Haunting though that music is, it seems a surprising choice for this production, being pretty well-known in its own right and quite strongly associated with a specifically American modernism.

All these little doubts and feints aside, I was impressed and ultimately a bit upset by Women of Troy -- the last ten or fifteen minutes, and in particular the brilliantly managed final moments, are utterly convincing and quite harrowing. I can comfortably declare my petty Mitchell Embargo well and truly over. There's no mistaking the scale of her -- and Taylor's, and her remarkable cast's -- achievement here.



The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other
National Theatre

That it should be possible to see Women of Troy and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other on consecutive nights from the exact same seat in the Lyttelton, as I did, pretty much speaks for itself as a testament to the extraordinary reinvigoration that continues to transform the National under Nicholas Hytner. To see this important Peter Handke play programmed into one of the most significant spaces in the country is massively exciting and, in a way, a huge relief, in that it seems to be just another indicator of a small but substantial shift in the centre of gravity in our theatre culture. Arts Council garbage notwithstanding, it's a great time to be involved in and caring about theatre here.

OK. That said, every time I hear about somebody being discombobulated by The Hour..., the phrase I find myself wanting to reach for is: "Calm down, dear, it's only a commercial." I had better say right away that, not having read the text -- either Meredith Oakes's translation or any prior version -- I can't say whether the observations that follow refer to Handke's play or to this production of it in particular, though a certain amount of the commentary that has already been aired around the piece suggests the latter more than the former. What seems very striking to me is how far this show is from the fearsome hairshirt experimentalism that some were tremulously anticipating. I was expecting a sort of epic enigma; in fact, what we get is, in most ways, a very cleverly wrought, slightly old-fashioned farce: diagrammatic plotting; thumbnailed characters -- or, rather, character types; frantic rhapsodies of entry and exit; and a bustle of incongruent relationships that add up to as little as possible beyond an extended sequence of frissons.

What puzzles me is how none of the commentary that I've seen picks up on the fundamental discrepancy between the moment-to-moment operations of the piece and the tonal resonance of its titular promise -- and I don't just mean its actual duration, way in excess of an hour. If, as many critics have noted, and my experience seems to bear this out, what we are given here is a sort of cascade of stories that begin and then (in most, though by no means all, cases) are withdrawn before they can resolve, then surely what enables those stories to arise is not our ignorance and estrangement of each other's lives, but our learned ability to read, particularly from the stage, a massive amount of information about a character in just a few seconds. Few if any of the characters we're shown here really are enigmatic or unknowable, nor are their thoughts and movements inscrutable to us; we make quick decisions about these characters, based on quickly recognizable signs, and within, what?, ten or fifteen seconds, we feel we know a great deal about who these people are and where they might be going. And so, like any farce or comedy of manners, the propelling technology here is not the uncontainable and ineffable quality of the strangeness of others, but the airless, and ultimately joyless, proximity of what makes them so familiar that, before we've even glimpsed them, we already know enough about them to sustain us through the few seconds of stage life that most of them will have. Written with unassailable skill, powered by the audience's recognition of what it is shown, fully invested in the titillation of standard narrative response, and daring only in the most rapidly assimilable ways, The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other is, on this evidence, a play that Alan Bennett might have written at this late point in his career, had Bennett ever had the remotest critical interest in theatre (as he casually and genially admits he doesn't).

The pitch at which the familiarity of these characters is telegraphed by the busy cast is in itself one good reason why I'm perplexed by the suggestion that's been mooted in a few places that the piece would have done better had it been staged in the public space outside the National, supposedly blending indistinguishably into its surroundings. Such events are, I'm certain, absolutely crucial to the future negotiation of what theatre can be and mean: but I can't see that this piece, at least in its current production, is a plausible candidate -- quite apart from the extent to which the pleasures of this show are so much to do with Handke's writing, his authorial control of a closed space whose parameters we do not initially know. Inside or out, the world of The Hour... is not boundaryless, it is carried in the projections of the actors and the crafting of their interactions. It would never not be distinguishable as a bordered piece, and as such, to most intents it may as well be inside the Lyttelton as outside. If conclusive proof of this were needed, consider the passage towards the end of the play where yet more actors / characters start clambering out of the auditorium and onto stage. Knowing that such a disturbance of the piece's insularity was coming up, I harboured some faint hope that the device might at least create an interesting disruption which would alter the pitch-trajectory of the play. Not so; and in fact, I felt almost insulted by the way it was done (perhaps this is Handke "offending the audience" agane?). These emergent twerps took nothing of us with them, but right from the get-go were performing away just like their staged colleagues. Syntactically of course the only way of resolving this manoeuvre, if it fails to have the effect of de-virtualising the stage, is for the rest of the audience to submit to the same gloss of strenuous fictionality. Perhaps part of the problem is that the theory of this kind of diegetic collapse is considerably advanced now on where it was in 1992 when the play was written.

I don't want to overegg this indignation. I enjoyed myself; I found that I was very content watching the show, once I had figured out where it was aiming itself; I didn't look at my watch, and I was prepared for it to go on longer than it did, so that the ending seemed quite sudden and in a way rather understatedly moving. The only truly beautiful moments though, for me, were those when something else, something actually 'other', was doing the acting: alone on stage, a remote-controlled buggy zips around for a while, its manipulator unseen; some newspaper pages, and, later, a wedding veil, are buffeted by the wind. But it's when one considers what is going on in such moments that one realises how cautious, at least by present standards, Handke (or his director here) has been. 450 characters; yet, as per the adage, no children, and no animals. Obviously, in part, thank God that we were spared the sight of any of these actors 'playing' children; one of them does a turn as Puss in Boots, but that doesn't count as an animal, ok? The point is, this production does not -- I mean, really, my word, by a long way, does not -- pass the Cat Test, and as such, any relation to the future of theatre is purely coincidental. The best thing that can conceivably come out of this production, in those terms, is a smaller, more intimate, production somewhere else of Handke's stunning The Long Way Round, which, given a sensitive treatment by actors who really might just have stepped up out of the audience, could yet save us all.



Ridiculsmus: Tough Time, Nice Time
Barbican Pit

Aside from, naturally, The Street of Crocodiles, I've never seen anything in a