So it transpires the package is promo for a new company, RETZ, and a couple of productions they’re doing: O Brave New World and PROCESS. The connection to HALL is what piqued my interest, because that production was undermined only by its own enormous ambition, and if the same people are still making theatre a couple of years later, perhaps the technology and their experience will have caught up with their vision. They’ve definitely got good PR people. This little package was a treat to unpack.

I’m intrigued to know exactly what the connection is to HALL, because the company behind that production, 1929, still seems to be active. (1929 also did Threshold, which was a highlight of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for me in 2010.) HALL isn’t actually mentioned in the RETZ promo material, only on my personalised advice slip. Who or what ties the two together? Writers? Producers? AD? The mystery deepens. Whoever they are, these people know how to drum up buzz.

This week Richard, Helen and I represented Blackshaw at the British Library’s second Mervyn Peake centenary celebration panel discussion. I’d felt gutted that I hadn’t made it along to the first one (Ellie and Vikki did, and had friendly chats with Brian Sibley and China Mieville, amongst others), but in hindsight I’m glad.

The first event focused on Gormenghast. Until I got involved with Blackshaw, Gormenghast was all I knew of Peake. I first became aware of it (and him) through the BBC2 miniseries, bought the collected tie-in edition of the novels, and never thought to delve deeper.

So while the Gormenghast-focused celebration would undoubtedly have been enjoyable, it wouldn’t have been as educational as the follow-up, which illuminated the many other facets of Peake’s artistry. Besides his novels, he wrote short stories, poems and plays, and was also a painter and draughtsman.

The evening was a flurry of fascinating facts, but these are the ones that stuck most in my mind.

1. Fabian Peake (son of Mervyn) revealed that his father had a different room in the house for each of his different activities – one for writing, one for painting, etc. This was mostly a practical arrangement, so he didn’t splash paint on his drawings, and so on.
2. Journalist Hilary Spurling talked at length about the illustrations Mervyn Peake drew for Alice in Wonderland – in particular his free-spirited, nymphettish Alice, who was a precursor to (not necessarily an influence on, but it’s fun to speculate) Nabokov’s iconic Lolita. (And his Mad Hatter was based on a man he saw in a phone box on the Charing Cross Road.)
3. Sebastian Peake (also son of Mervyn, and someone we deal with regularly – he gets to vet our Titus Groan script before we’re allowed to perform it!) shared a wonderful anecdote: apparently his father used to trick strangers in the street into holding opposite ends of a tape measure, round the corner from one another, under the pretext of helping him ‘measure the corner’. He’d retreat to a nearby coffee shop and watch them. His record was twenty minutes. What a mischief-maker.
4. Lecturer Rob Maslen introduced us to Peake poems and plays. As a big fan of Spike Milligan and Frank Key, I was particularly excited to hear that Peake wrote volumes of nonsense poetry. After a quick discussion about nonsense poetry amongst the panel, I came away with a reading list including Peake, Ogden Nash and Edward Lear.
5. A Gormenghast-related one to end on: Peake wrote an alternative song for Swelter to sing at the beginning of Titus Groan. It’s published in one of his collections. Rob Maslen read the first couple of stanzas (in Swelter’s voice) and it’s a delight. As we left, I could see Richard plotting and scheming ways of getting it into our adaptation.

The basic concept is that you pull public-domain content from a variety of social streams – Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others – and arrange it all into a coherent, chronological, columnar narrative. The intended outcome is to allow individuals to make some sense out of the barrages of citizen journalism that issue from newsworthy events. The journalist, then, if that title retains any relevance, is a filter, ordering chaos to make it digestible for anyone who has the yen to understand, but not the time or knowledge to filter for themselves.

Contrary to the claims on Storify’s site, Storified streams can’t yet be embedded into WordPress blog posts. If and when that functionality becomes available, I’ll make use of it. In the meantime, I’ll just link you out to the stories in their native habitat, on Storify’s website.

My first foray was to chronicle The Fall of the News of the World, since it was all the internet was talking about at the time, and I knew I’d have plenty of content to draw on.

Then I tried applying Storify to arts coverage and reviewing, by livetweeting my reaction to Five Truths at the Victoria and Albert Museum and saving the tweets for posterity as a Storify stream.

Let me know what you think (about Storify/storyful in general, or my stories in particular). I’ll post more as I continue experimenting.

There are a few reasons:

• I have a full-time job and a lot of on-the-side activities, and something had to go – there aren’t enough hours in the day, and if there were I still wouldn’t have the stamina.
• I recently realised I’d started seeing reviews as the chore I had to endure in order to see the show for free. Not a healthy attitude for a reviewer.
• I got sick of going to the theatre on my own. (I know, world’s smallest violin, etc.)

I might still occasionally blog shows that I go to see for fun, so if you’re subscribed to this blog (by RSS or email or what have you), don’t unsubscribe: just leave that subscription ticking over in the background and see what happens. (It’s more effort to unsubscribe than to stay subscribed, right?)

Before I go I’d like to plug one of the aforementioned on-the-side activities:

www.BlackshawOnline.com

Blackshaw’s a combined theatre company, events organiser and drama education service. If you’ve found, by reading my reviews, that you share my taste in theatre to any extent, Blackshaw should be worth keeping an eye on. Our first major production will be Titus Groan, a stage adaptation of the first novel in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, slated for Autumn 2011.

Thanks for reading. See you around the web.

-Matt.

Interview: Michael Laurence. After a brief extract from the work, the writer and performer talks to Matt Boothman about his new play, Krapp, 39 (Tristan Bates Theatre), which is an autobiographical piece in which Laurence, a Samuel Beckett fan and inspired by Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), creates a diary using video, a laptop and audio recording on his 39th birthday.

You can listen to this interview using the player below.

If you’d like to download the episode, right-click here and “Save As”.

You can also click here to subscribe to the podcast using iTunes.

Sarah Kane’s first play features rape (both explicit and implied), bigotry, despair, physical and psychological torture, the sucking-out of a man’s eyes and the cannibalism of a dead baby. What respite there is comes from the darkest possible humour. And Sean Holmes’s production both lingers on the atrocities, and punctuates them with eked-out moments of anticipation-laden near-inaction: held breaths of suffocating duration.

It’s not a play you enjoy; it’s one you endure.

When I arrive home from the theatre, the first thing my housemates ask is “Did you enjoy it?”. Taking in a show is a leisure pursuit, so it isn’t surprising that people judge the experience on how pleasurable it is. So can giving your audience a thoroughly miserable time ever be considered a valid artistic objective?

To mix my media momentarily and paraphrase Sally Sparrow from the Doctor Who episode Blink, sad is happy for deep people. Enjoyment isn’t necessarily every theatregoer’s goal or expectation; or at least, enjoyment can be reached by more than one route – for instance, via discomfort.

Stick with me.

In Blasted, the Soldier (Aidan Kelly) accuses journalist Ian (Danny Webb) of closing his eyes to the lives and hardships of the people he meets. To watch / endure Blasted, and not to turn away when (for instance) the Soldier goes to work on Ian, is to prove oneself better than Ian and the people he represents (you and I). The enjoyment to be had from the play is a kind of solemn, supercilious smugness. “I watched. I didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening. I faced it without flinching.”

But who left the auditorium resolved to pay more attention to foreign wars, or to the people sleeping in shop doorways on your way to work? Not I. I was just relieved it was over. That’s just the thing: it ends. You know it’ll end even if it seems interminable (and those dramaturgical held breaths of Holmes’s play havoc with your perception of time; it’s masterful). You’re allowed to stop facing it down – it lets you win the staring contest in a way real life never will. The victory is fiction, and the smugness is founded on fiction.

Written by Sarah Kane

Crew includes Sean Holmes (director), Stef O’Driscoll (assistant director), Paul Wills (designer), Paule Constable (lighting designer) and Christopher Smutt (sound designer)

Cast includes Aidan Kelly (Soldier), Danny Webb (Ian), Lydia Wilson (Cate)

Need a second opinion? (Or for someone to actually tell you whether the production / performances were any good?)

• Read Michael Billington’s review for The Guardian
• Read Charles Spencer’s review for The Telegraph
• Read Paul Taylor’s review for The Independent
• Read Quentin Letts’s review for the Daily Mail
• Read Aleks Sierz’s review for The Stage
• Read Honour Bayes’s review for Fourth Wall Magazine
• Read Aleks Sierz’s review for The Arts Desk
• Read Michael Coveney’s review for What’s On Stage
• Read Hannah Stratton’s review for The Public Reviews
• Read Jake Orr’s review for A Younger Theatre
• Read the West End Whingers’ review
• Read Matt Trueman’s review on Carousel of Fantasies
• Read Diana Damian’s review on her blog
• Read Ian Foster’s review on There Ought To Be Clowns
• Read Eoghan O’Neill’s review on his eponymous blog
• Read @lurkmoophy’s review on his blog
• Read Dominic Kent’s review on his Theatre Thoughts blog

Interview: Lucy Bailey and Anda Winters. The Co-Artistic Directors of The Print Room in Notting Hill, London’s newest theatre venue, talk to me about the venture, which launches with Fabrication by Italian writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. Recorded at The Print Room.

You can listen to this interview using the player below.

If you’d like to download the episode, right-click here and “Save As”.

You can also click here to subscribe to the podcast using iTunes.

My review of Belt Up‘s Lorca is Dead for The List, which you can find on List.co.uk, here on my blog or in issue 664 of The List magazine, is not the first review I wrote of that show. Compare and contrast the version I originally submitted to The List:

I admit it: I wanted Lorca is Dead to be a repeat of Belt Up’s five-star masterpiece The Tartuffe, and that was very wrong of me. Earlier this year at the York Theatre Royal, the company permanently retired The Tartuffe by killing off its protagonist, Orgon Poquelin; but Lorca is Dead sounded similar enough on paper that I dared hope for another zany laugh-a-minute anarch-o-thon to fill the void.

The two plays share a writer, Dominic J Allen, and both centre around a group of artists with a loose grip on reality (in this case the Paris Surrealists). The larger-than-life characters, plays within plays within plays, and stream-of-consciousness storytelling style that characterise Allen’s writing are all present in both cases. In Lorca is Dead, however, he uses those tools to create, not wacky hijinks, but unease, unrest and melancholy. Someone has, after all, died.

That isn’t to say there are no hijinks at all; there are, courtesy of a dangerously egomaniacal Salvador Dalí, but they’re denounced by all as disrespectful, and cause much of the aforementioned unease. Dalí’s plot to rewrite the history of the Surrealist movement with himself at the centre, using the time machine Antonin Artaud created to help tell Lorca’s life story, is just one of the play’s many parallel threads. The Surrealists re-enact Lorca’s life story, passing him like a baton amongst themselves and the audience; meanwhile the movement is succumbing to infighting caused by political, philosophical and personal differences, exacerbated by Dalí.

So much happens, and continues happening, all at once, throughout the play, that not everything gets a sufficient airing, and the pace drops occasionally when two threads intersect and the ensemble can’t change direction fast enough. But whatever the play’s flaws, at least it isn’t what I wanted: more of the same.

Shortly after this review appeared on List.co.uk – but thankfully well before it was due to appear in print – I received the following email from James Wilkes, one of Belt Up’s artistic directors.

from James Wilkes

to Matt Boothman

date 12 August 2010 16:08

subject Re: Preview

Hi Matt

Just caught your review of Lorca. Could you retract the statement about the two plays having the same writer, this is factually inaccurate. I wrote The Tartuffe, Dominic J Allen wrote Lorca. We are two very different writers aiming for different ends.

Thankyou very much for your support for The Tartuffe but as a company, we appreciate reviewers commenting more on what the plays are, not what they’re not. I hope you can find the time to return to the play with a more open mind.

Kirsty Green and Hayley Shillito in Heroin(e) for Breakfast. Image courtesy of Martin Shippen Arts Marketing and Media

Warehouse Theatre, Croydon, 8 – 31 October 2010

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

Is anyone else sick of being harangued from the stage? For being too middle class, or too complacent, or too passive?

It’s a technique that suffers from the law of diminishing returns. If Heroin(e) for Breakfast were the only play to barge down the fourth wall and berate the audience about their lifestyle, it would be groundbreaking, challenging, even blistering in its attack on modern social mores. But Tim Crouch already did it in The Author, Lowri Jenkins did it in 19;29′s Threshold, David Leddy did it in Sub Rosa – and that’s just counting shows at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. At the risk of sounding too middle class, one can only take so much.

The character doing the ribbing in this case is Tommy Croft (Craig McArdle), a self-styled revolutionary and, almost incidentally, a heroin user. Being quite justifiably fed up with being judged and diagnosed by the moral majority, Tommy injects them (i.e. us) with a strong dose of their (our) own medicine and – in a rare case of recursive double irony – proves his own point about the ineffectiveness of the hectoring sermon as an incentive for behavioural change.

In the beginning, Tommy’s fun to be around. He speaks his mind, he’s got an offbeat worldview and a gleefully filthy way with words. So are Chloe and Edie (Kirsty Green and Kate Daley), the girls that share his flat (and affections): playwright Philip Stokes has a good ear for corrosive snark, and the pair fling his stinging lines laconically across the stage, like paper planes full of anthrax.

Even the play’s most hazardous theatrical conceit, the personification of heroin in the body of Marilyn Monroe (actually Hayley Shillito), is executed with such balls that only the most hardened Naturalist wouldn’t buy in.

But come act two, the bunch of them have become tiresome. Tommy’s metatheatrical asides begin to seem gimmicky. The girls drop the subtext-laden sarcasm and just shout at each other (and Tommy) instead. Heroin(e)‘s oratory gets repetitive, and with each repetition rings increasingly hollow.

If the point is that heroin addiction makes you strung-out, paranoid, delusional and dull, Heroin(e) for Breakfast succeeds a little too well. Of course it wouldn’t be realistic for the light-hearted fun and games to continue once the shooting up begins, but the tonal shift is such that the play actually ceases to be engaging. And sorry, Tommy: whether it’s coming from the pulpit or the pews, a sermon’s a sermon, and no one reacts well to being told how to live.

Written by Philip Stokes

Crew includes Philip Stokes (director), Craig Lomas (set), Marie Dalton (lighting) and Carley Marsh (costume)

Cast includes Kate Daley (Edie), Kirsty Green (Chloe), Craig McArdle (Tommy) and Hayley Shillito (Heroin(e))

Need a second opinion?

• Read Paul Vale’s review for The Stage