2014 Theatre Magazine

UNMISSABLE THEATRE AT FESTIVAL 2014 THE JAMES PLAYS – LOVE, BLOOD AND BLIND AMBITION STAN DOUGLAS’S FILM NOIR-INSPIRED HELEN LAWRENCE A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH – UBU AND THE TRUTH COMMISSION

Multi-layered portrait of a nation

Photo David Eustace

Writer Susan Mansfield talks to playwright Rona Munro about her bold new trilogy of plays about the lives of three Scottish Kings

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James II: Day of the Innocents shifts the focus to the children, a king crowned at the age of eight and sentenced to a life as a pawn in other people’s power games.

Munro describes James III: The True Mirror as ‘an elegant love story in the style of an old Hollywood drama with Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn, where witty, stylish lovers are having their lovers’ spats in the midst of big events’. James III’s queen, Margaret of Denmark (played by The Killing’s Sofie Gråbøl), must intervene on her wayward husband’s behalf to ensure the stability of the realm.

Laurie Sansom describes The James Plays as ‘a multi-layered portrait of a nation’.

‘When I first read them, I realised they were something extraordinary to offer to audiences during a year when Scotland’s history and future are under the spotlight. Rona is looking at how a nation struggles with what it should be, what it should become. Each of the plays is, in a really joyful, ebullient, irreverent way, exploring some of the contradictions at the heart of Scottish life.’

Susan Mansfield is a freelance writer

James I: The Key Will Keep The Lock James II: Day of The Innocents James III: The True Mirror 10–22 August 12 noon, 4.00pm and 8.15pm (dates for each performance vary, see website for details) Festival Theatre eif.co.uk/jamesplays £15–£35 (fees apply). Special Offer: Buy tickets for all three plays and save 20% (excludes previews) Supported through Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund

Photo David Eustace

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atching a recent staging of Shakespeare’s history plays, Rona Munro became convinced of one thing. ‘I realised how much our general understanding of English history comes from these plays’, she says. ‘We don’t have a Scottish equivalent and that is a huge loss.

So I thought I’d have a bash.’

Acclaimed for her work in theatre, television and film, Munro’s trilogy of histories, The James Plays, which premieres at the Festival, is one of the most ambitious theatrical projects to be realised in Scotland in recent years.

The plays, which will be directed by National Theatre of Scotland artistic director Laurie Sansom in a co-production with the Festival and the National Theatre of Great Britain, open up a lesser known period in Scottish history. But for Munro, the 15th century has innate theatrical potential: big events being played out in the lives of a small group of individuals; kings wrestling with what kingship means; enough historical record to create a framework but still leave room for the imagination.

‘The biggest thing I wanted to do was make it contemporary,’ she says. ‘To shake the idea that history was a far off time with funny people who didn’t talk like us or think like us. What excites me about history is that these were people just like us.’

Munro’s deft handling of human drama will combine with innovative staging to tell three distinct stories. James I: The Key Will Keep The Lock, depicts a young man who spent 18 years of his life as a prisoner of the English, only to be returned to Scotland to take up the crown with a ransom on his head and an English bride.

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Post-war noir Canadian artist Stan Douglas on his new production exploring life after war

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ike all great film noirs, there’s nothing black and white about Helen Lawrence, the post World War Two ‘cinematic stage production’ put together by Canadian artist, photographer and film-maker Stan Douglas in collaboration with screen-writer Chris Haddock. What there is on both stage and screen in this international co-production is a set of familiar noir-based iconography that shows off an altogether bigger if somewhat shadowy picture of life after, rather than during, wartime.

‘Post-war periods are real periods of flux,’ says Douglas, ‘In Canada, a lot of war veterans came back to Vancouver, and there was a real housing problem. People were living in huts because they had nowhere else to go. Also, there was a lot of corruption.

Everyone was a little bit crooked, but after the war that wasn’t going to be tolerated. It was a local symptom of a global condition.’

Helen Lawrence is set between Vancouver’s iconic Old Hotel, which was squatted by homeless war veterans, and the mixed race Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood, where illicit gambling dens and whorehouses existed after hours. Into this steps Douglas’ eponymous heroine, a pillpopping and booze-soaked femme fatale in search of the man who framed her for her husband’s murder and saw her confined to the sanatorium.

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‘She’s a foreigner who’s come to find somebody,’ says Douglas. ‘She’s experienced war herself.’

With such a hard-boiled scenario, Haddock’s experience writing and producing TV drama, including episodes of HBO’s gangster series, Boardwalk Empire, is clearly an asset.

‘The film noir is caused by experiences of war,’ says Douglas. ‘There are femme fatales, and tight-lipped tough-guys who’ve done horrible things in the war. So film noir was certainly not like anything on YouTube.’

‘Wars happen’, he says.‘Wars are our new reality. It’s how you deal with them that matters.’

Neil Cooper is Theatre Critic for The Herald

Helen Lawrence Sunday 24 – Tuesday 26 August 8.00pm Monday 25 August 3.00pm King’s Theatre eif.co.uk/helenlawrence £12–£32 (fees apply) Supported by Ewan and Christine Brown With additional support from Canadian High Commission to the United Kingdom

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Photo David Cooper

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Photo Armin Smailovic

On all fronts Mark Fisher experiences FRONT, a new work from Thalia Theater and director Luk Perceval

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t’s a Saturday night in Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre and a line of men have taken their places across the front of the stage. In their black suits and white shirts, they could be the members of an orchestra. One of them even plays a strange homemade trumpet.

With their faces illuminated only by the lights of their music stands, they perch on crates and gaze into the middle distance.

They have started to look more like soldiers eyeing up the no man’s land between their trench and the enemy lines.

We’re watching FRONT, a timely theatrical reimagining of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and the very embodiment of Festival 2014’s theme exploring conflict and culture inspired by the commemoration of the centenary of the beginning of the Great War of 1914–18.

As well as drawing on Remarque’s still stunning novel about life for German frontline soldiers, director Luk Perceval takes material from Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, a French view of this war to end all wars, and other contemporary sources to tell the story from every side of the conflict.

‘It’s commonly known as one of the most cruel wars,’ says Perceval. ‘It’s a landmark between the past and the future. On the one hand, they were thinking they could win this war with cavalry and, on the other hand, they had built these huge industrial machines. Seventy million people died and 700,000 horses.’

While Ferdinand Försch’s fearsome thunder sheets rumble like exploding bombs, the cast slip from German to Flemish to French to English, their phrases echoing each other across the battlefield. Despite their attitude of kill-or-be-killed, they have more similarities than differences.

‘You hear them talking about the same things from both sides of the front,’ says the Belgian director. ‘Now this war has been behind us for 100 years, every country is focusing on it from its own side: the English side, the Belgian side and so on. But when you read and compare the contemporary diaries and letters, there is just one big need which they all have in common and that is to go home. They all describe a kind of Dante’s Inferno; even in our most brutal fantasy, what happened there is not imaginable.’

Mark Fisher is a freelance journalist and critic

FRONT Friday 22 – Tuesday 26 August 7.00pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh eif/co.uk/front £10–£32 (fees apply) Supported by

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A search for the truth South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company explores the search for truth after conflicts

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hen conflicts end, those once involved in them often face a difficult choice between truth and justice. They can offer an amnesty for all those evil acts committed during the war, in return for a full and truthful account of what really happened; or they can seek to bring all those who committed crimes to justice, in which case the vast majority who fought are likely to remain silent.

So it is essential that any festival exploring the theme of war should give some weight to this question of what happens when wars end; and this year’s Edinburgh International Festival features one of the most powerful shows ever made on this theme, in the shape of Handspring Puppet Company’s Ubu And The Truth Commission.

First seen in Johannesburg in 1997, the show was created by leading artist William Kentridge in response to the work of South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which began in 1996.

The commission hearings themselves were remarkable pieces of political theatre, says Kentridge, rare examples of a society seeking fully to understand a conflict, and to hear the grief-stricken voices of its victims. But his show – co-created with writer Jane Taylor and the inspired Handspring Puppet designer Adrian Kohler, who also co-created the magnificent puppets for War Horse – goes much further, framing Albert Jarry’s obscene tyrants Ma and Pa Ubu as the perpetrators who are about to be pardoned for their crimes in return for their testimony, and drawing audiences into the full horror of the Truth Commission revelations through an electrifying use of animated film and shadowplay, and of puppet-actors who represent the real-life victims of violence, bearing witness at the Commission.

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Ubu And The Truth Commission is widely recognised, worldwide, as a true and enduring masterpiece of political theatre. And of all the shows in this year’s Festival, it perhaps brings together most powerfully and explosively the Festival’s twin themes of war and Commonwealth, in telling a story of the violence that lies at the root of the colonial experience, of the war that results when oppressed people struggle to break free, and of what a society must do – and what it must tolerate – in order to recognise the full truth of such a conflict, and to begin to leave it behind, at last.

Joyce McMillan is Theatre Critic and columnist for The Scotsman

Ubu and the Truth Commission Thursday 28 – Saturday 30 August 8.00pm; Saturday 30 August 2.30pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh eif.co.uk/ubu £10–£32 (fees apply) Supported by

SOUTH AFRICA – UNITED KINGDOM SEASONS 2014 & 2015

Inspiring new ways

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Photo Ruphin Condyzer

Fearless theatre Claire Black is thrilled by Back to Back Theatre’s multi-layered production

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ho has the right to tell which stories? Why does the elephantheaded Hindu god, Ganesh, travel through time to Nazi Germany? What assumptions do we as audiences make about performers with physical or intellectual disabilities?

If you’re after a snooze in the side stalls, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich probably isn’t for you. Festooned with awards and lauded with critical acclaim since its premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Festival in 2011, Back to Back Theatre’s audacious epic has been described as a show for audiences ‘who feel they’ve seen it all’.

A play within a play, it tells two stories.

First, the quest of Ganesh, the Hindu god of wisdom, success and over-coming obstacles, to reclaim the sacred Sanskrit symbol of the swastika from the Nazis. Signifying good fortune and well-being, the ancient symbol has been appropriated and grossly distorted by the Third Reich. Second, the challenges for a theatre company of trying to put on this very play, a South Asian deity confronting the horrors of the Holocaust, revealed through tense creative discussions and rehearsal room ruckuses.

Add to this that Back to Back Theatre’s actors have a range of intellectual disabilities and are being led in this piece by a nondisabled director with an agenda of his own

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and the play’s exploration of power and powerlessness, subjugation and exploitation reaches a different level. When Bruce Gladwin, artistic director of the company since 1999, writes in his manifesto that his aim is to, ‘challenge and enrich the audience, to liberate from the conditioned response and from the familiar’ he really, truly means it.

This is bold, gutsy, fearless theatre – simultaneously an interrogation of power and its abuses, an exploration of theatrical form and function, and a hugely imaginative artistic endeavour, which will transport audiences from mystical India to Hitler’s bunker. Profound, absurd, funny, in a word, unmissable.

Claire Black is a features writer for The Scotsman

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich Saturday 9, Monday 11 & Tuesday 12 August 7.30pm Sunday 10 August 2.30pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh eif.co.uk/ganesh £10–£32 (fees apply) Supported by The Pirie Rankin Charitable Trust

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Photo Jeff Busby

Portrait of an artist Director Tom Cairns talks to Mark Fisher about Thomas Bernhard’s Minetti

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being an artist and how that sets him apart from other people. But the play is not really to do with Minetti, the actor, it’s a much more broad and universal question than that.’

And an actor of Eyre’s standing (he played the Ghost to Jude Law’s Hamlet) is ideal for the part.

‘In between the vulnerability and anger, you need someone with gravitas, someone you can imagine having that quality of the great actor.’ Mark Fisher

Minetti Saturday 16 – Monday 18 August 8.00pm; Sunday 17 August 2.30pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh eif.co.uk/minetti £10–£32 (fees apply) Supported by

Photo Konstantinos Veletas Photo Wonge Bergmann

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here are a few layers to get your head around with this one. It’s a play about a character called Minetti. The name comes from Bernhard Minetti, the actor for whom playwright Thomas Bernhard wrote it in 1976. It is also about an actor – a leading man who, after years in the wilderness, is ready to make a comeback in the role of King Lear.

Four decades later, it’s the turn of Peter Eyre to play this fictional actor with a real actor’s surname. If that all sounds too circular, don’t be misled. Director and designer Tom Cairns says it’s a piece with wide resonance.

‘The play is about acting, audiences and dramatic literature – but that is buried inside the sad condition this man finds himself in,’ he says, adding that Bernhard was one of Harold Pinter’s favourite writers. ‘He is disappointed in life itself, how we all behave with each other and the great question of

A unique sound Keith Bruce profiles Harry Partch’s unique music-theatre, Delusion of the Fury

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ive years before his death in 1974, American iconoclast Harry Partch wrote to one of his main supporters, the art collector Betty Freeman, ‘For decades I’ve been reconciled to the very great probability that there will be no extension of my work beyond my death. If there is extension of spirit I’ll be happy.’

Performances of Partch’s compositions, and particularly of his vast music-theatre work Delusion of the Fury are, indeed, rare and to be treasured. It is not hard to see why.

Partch rejected the Western idea of temperament at an early age, and painstakingly developed his own 43 note scale and his own notion for it. Naturally, such music required its own instruments, so Partch built them: the Chromelodeon, the Gourd Tree and Cloud Chamber Bowls among them. His own collection are now museum pieces, so playing his music demands building the instruments on which to perform it.

Which is exactly what Ensemble musikFabrik of Cologne have had done so that director Heiner Goebbels, making a very welcome return to the Festival, can achieve his ambition of performing Delusion of the Fury.

Goebbels’ version is the first to be seen and heard in Europe and the creation of a whole new suite of instruments means that he and Ensemble musikFabrik are now enthusiastic to share that experience across the continent. It is an opportunity no-one should pass by.

Keith Bruce is Arts Editor for The Herald

Delusion of the Fury Friday 29 August & Saturday 30 August 8.00pm King’s Theatre eif.co.uk/delusionofthefury £15–£35 (fees apply)

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Photo Natalia Shcherbakova

Feel the love Andrew Dickson talks to director Vladimir Pankov about his new SounDrama production

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t isn’t quite enough to call The War ‘theatre’ – following the principles of the genre director Vladimir Pankov and his collective call ‘soundrama’, it will meld together spoken performance, choreography, sound design and above all live music.

‘There are so many genres in existence already,’ says Pankov, who is also a composer and actor in his own right. ‘What we are trying to do is jumble them up, switching from serious opera to traditional theatre to different genres of music.’

The War begins in 1913. Set in Paris, it focuses on three main characters: an agitator who yearns for conflict to purge Europe through fire; a pacifist who is reluctantly sent to the front; and a father

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struggling to reconcile duty and deep personal loss. SounDrama are working with existing firsthand accounts, but will remake them into an original script.

Pankov says, ‘We’re interested in the idea that the war is personal. Of course it is a conflict between nation states, but we also want it to be a clash of personalities.’

They will succeed if they can make the audience find empathy with a conflict so huge and forbidding that its human dimensions get lost. Pankov says, simply.

‘My goal is to make people feel a bit more love.’

Andrew Dickson is a writer and critic for The Guardian

The War Saturday 9 – Monday 11 August 8.00pm Sunday 10 August 3.00pm King’s Theatre eif.co.uk/thewar £12–£32 (fees apply) Supported by The Director’s Circle

The human object South African artist Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B makes for a powerful emotional experience

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spectacles’ that were presented to millions of Europeans and North Americans during and after the scramble for colonies in Africa. Bailey says ‘As soon as you see another human being as an object you can do whatever you want, they become objects where it is only the surface that matters.’

In here you will see fellow humans sitting naked and chained, in glass boxes and under signs, along with details of real histories, poetic props and tales of forgotten or disregarded atrocities and attempted genocides. An overwhelming aesthetic and emotional experience, Exhibit B is also a necessary if painful history lesson because, for, as one observer noted, ‘Europe has a lot to learn.’

9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22 & 25 August: Performances from 2.00pm – 5.50pm; 16, 17, 23 and 24 August: Performances from 10.30am – 5.50pm eif.co.uk/exhibitb £14 (fees apply) Supported by

SOUTH AFRICA – UNITED KINGDOM SEASONS 2014 & 2015

Inspiring new ways

Phil Miller is Arts Correspondent for The Herald

Photo Sofie Knijff

he live people you will see in this show, which is both a performance and an exhibition, will stand absolutely still. They will stand in their positions in this installation in the Playfair Library Hall as if they are frozen. But their eyes will lock with yours as you, all alone, walk around Exhibit B. You won’t be able to escape their stare.

This version of Exhibit B will be different from previous shows. South African artist and director Brett Bailey has studied contemporary issues of ‘otherness’ in the current affairs of Britain – from deportation flights to immigration policy to racial profiling – and the show will address those alongside his installations addressing the way Africans were presented as savages, inferiors and objects of conquest in the 19th century.

The original inspiration for this show was the human zoos or ‘exotic

Exhibit B

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Photo Stuart Armitt

Fiery Festival Finale!

Festival 2014 concludes with a spectacular concert, with fireworks launched from Edinburgh’s iconic Castle to music by Wagner, Beethoven, Debussy and Mendelssohn, concluding with Tchaikovsky’s electrifying 1812 Overture, performed live by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Virgin Money Fireworks Concert Sunday 31 August 9.00pm eif.co.uk/virginmoneyfireworks Sponsored by

Book your Festival 2014 tickets now and enjoy unmissable world-class theatre this summer!

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