Noises Off 2014 - Wednesday by Chris Perkin

2014 Issue 4 Wednesday 16th April

Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

Noises OFF

Today’s Contents

Like an American Anna Himali Howard

2 Reviews - Americana

3 Reviews - Punk Rock 5 Reviews - Road 6 Reviews - Jerusalem 8 Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

9 Are You Experienced? 10 What’s “Left”of Student Drama 12 A Total Culture Secretary

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noff.nsdf.org.uk 2 Noises OFF 16/04/14

During the discussion on Americana, the Hungry Bitches were challenged on their authenticity – had they experienced the precise issues they were talking about? The implication was that because they hadn’t, their presentation of American high school life was inaccurate and stereotypical. It was. And that, for me, was the whole point. This was not a piece of naturalism. If it were, it would be called America and not Americana. Our generation is culturally saturated with the brash, tacky, tasteless stereotypes and clichés which make up the concept of Americana. The Hungry Bitches took characters we all recognise, and satirised them in a high-energy explosion of high-school movies, TV shows, stars and stripes. A world preoccupied by these (inaccurate and stereotypical) imaginary teenagers collided with a world which endangers and marginalises real teenagers. It wasn’t always successful – some things were addressed with too much sensitivity, some with not enough. The change from the first to the second half was jarring not just because of the shift in tone, but the shift in genre, and a lot of the cutting satire was lost. However, being tacky and disrespectful isn’t the Hungry Bitches’ problem; it’s the best weapon they have. And when they embrace it, it’s glorious.

Reviews - Americana & Punk Rock

Sixth-form Massacre Play Adam Foster

[contains the odd spoiler] Simon Stephens once described Punk Rock as being like “The History Boys with a hand grenade up it”. This abridged version by ArtsEd Sixth-Form isn’t so much explosive as efficient. In the library of a Stockport grammar school, a flock of angsty adolescents are preparing for their mock A-Levels while navigating the pressures of teenage life. So far, so Bennett. There are no tweed-blazered professors here, though, and talk of Oxbridge makes way for a Columbine-style style massacre at the hands of a deeply troubled student. “Why?” he’s asked, after the event. “I did it because I could. I did it because it felt fucking great”. In its original form, Punk Rock builds slowly over the course of its two hour running time. The problem with abridging is that we lose the slow, tense build into sudden violence. The pared back psychological development makes for an unsubstantiated shoot-em-up which I found difficult to engage in. The cast do well to fill in the gaps. The early scenes when the whole ensemble are on stage crackle with latent aggression, conveying the hierarchical structures of Sixth-Form students with almost anthropological accuracy. Barnaby

Chambers in particular is outstanding as Bennett, negotiating Stephens’s heightened language with a virtuosity that masks a suppressed vulnerability. Paul Tully’s direction is tame by comparison, marked by gunshot audio, flashing lights and ineffective blackouts. After the shooting scene, we see the cast stand up in the semi-darkness, undermining all that has come before. Better to have them remain on the floor than shuffle selfconsciously towards the exit door. An ongoing collaboration with German director Sebastian Nübling, together with a “great German agent”, have established Stephens as a major dramatist within contemporary Germanlanguage theatre. If Stephens is popular in Germany, his popularity is even greater in student drama, with his plays being a mainstay of university drama societies, audition speeches and essays. But, much as I like Stephen’s work, it’s not enough to routinely remount them with little more than half-decent performances. The production shows a lack of ambition which slights the knotty complexity of Stephens’s work, making this a talented young company shackled to an A-level sensibility.

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Reviews - Punk Rock 4

White Noise Andrew Haydon

NSDF’14’s second revival of a play from 2009 this week (the first being Jerusalem) sees sixth formers from ArtsEd take on the second high-school shooting play of the week (cf. Americana).

timescale of the world-of-the-play – despite the ostensibly naturalistic/realist playing style.

On the other hand, there is also plenty to admire here. I have to admit, I feel pretty uncomfortable commenting – positively or Like Americana, the impulse for Simon negatively – on the appearance and classStephens’s Punk Rock comes from horror backgrounds of 17-year-old performers, so at shootings in American high schools like you’ll have to imagine that bit and look at Columbine. The major difference is that in the photos. I will say, I did find the contrast Stephens’s version, the action is transposed between real sixth-formers and the strange very firmly to England, and indeed, very idealised version of “what sixth-formers look specifically to Manchester/ like” in the casting of the Stockport. original to speak volumes I’m all for cutting about how British theatre Also, in common operates. the dead wood off with Americana, this scripts, provided enormously trimmed The in-the-round staging, version takes a pretty however, works like a dream. the end results severe swerve in its Sat on the small stage of makes an internally “Performing Studio 2” pushed second half. Reviewing the coherent or artistic out to the edge in two rows, original production, I suggested: “Punk Rock is the action never gets more sense. a long, slow deliberate than three or four metres build with a white noise from our noses. As such, fade-out”. No one could the scenes in which violence accuse ArtsEd’s version of a slow anything. happens are uncomfortably electrifying. Running at 1hr15, it whizzes through the What this version of Punk Rock does reveal – action at a hell of a rate. It feels like the crucial in common with Americana, interestingly – is moments from every scene (including the how difficult it is to make a piece of theatre always-cut-in-Germany coda scene with the in which an oppressed or bullied minority psychiatrist) are all present and correct. What’s rises above its tormentors that doesn’t have missing is all the talking around those incidents a certain element of “Fuck, yeah!” Guns, that lends the piece its tension and build-up. violence and power are immensely seductive I’m all for cutting the dead wood off scripts, – armed insurrection doubly so. I’m pretty sure provided the end results makes an internally this isn’t the intended “message” of Stephens’s coherent or artistic sense. I’m not sure I’m play, but in ArtsEd’s staging it comes damn fully convinced that ArtsEd entirely pull off the close to being the take-home impression. I do result of their cuts. Action jumps so fast that hope the end result of this year’s NSDF isn’t it hops from major incident to major incident that some alienated drama student storms the and arrives at the bloody denouement too fast Conservative Party headquarters with a couple to feel psychologically credible – even in the of AK-47s, but, well, y’know...

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Billy Barrett

Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

Britain today is depressingly similar to Jim Cartright’s depiction in his 1986 play Road. This production by Warwick University Drama Society, however, has changed immeasurably since I caught it at the Warwick Arts Centre in November last year. The promenade piece was quite an experience then – grittily theatrical and dazzlingly entertaining – but what’s on show in Scarborough this week is altogether more considered and mature. Scullery (Nima Taleghani) leads us on a tour of a broken down town in the post-industrial North. We meet an ensemble of characters, including party girls Lane and Dor (Daisy Gilbert and Charlotte Thomas) and street fighter turned zen master Skin-Lad (Angus Imrie), all struggling to make frayed ends meet. The first time around, Taleghani played Scullery as a rabble-rousing emcee, riffing off the audience and bringing a performative charm to proceedings. It was in tune with the 80s soundtrack that pounded as we came in, and this entertaining approach played well to the home crowd.

Reviews - Road

Street Art

Scullery’s still got us in his grubby grip, but here at NSDF he’s a character in his own right; a charming, but almost shy, thieving ne’er do well. The rest of the cast have followed suit and what were big, blazing performances have been honed into a series of properly empathetic characters. Middle-aged Helen’s seduction of a drunk soldier has developed from a tragicamp clowning routine by Victoria Watson to a sensitively handled, blackly comic tearjerker. Ed Franklin and Beth Holmes also deserve special mention for the ease with which they ageup and keep audiences on the edge of their wooden crates. Practical problems with the promenade have been ironed out in the transfer. The logistics of moving large set pieces - everything plus the kitchen sink - and herding large numbers of people previously overshadowed the human drama, and it was a sharp-elbowed scramble to see everything. Now with a scaled back set and a smaller venue, it’s more of an inverse in-the-round staging, bringing us devastatingly close to the road.

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Reviews - Jerusalem

Quiet Outlaw Georgia Snow

England’s green and pleasant land is neither green nor pleasant in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. It is a dank, grimy existence where locals are rotten with booze and drugs and smash their TVs in with cricket bats. Butterworth’s 2009 play is a vast expanse of a text that, unless bursting at the seams with energy and character, runs the risk of overwhelming its cast and underwhelming its audience. As is unfortunately the case for Minotaur Theatre Company’s production. Butterworth’s text still provides the majority of the production’s highlights, as it does its laughs, which tend to fall on sleepy ears. In Johnny “Rooster” Byron, Jonathan Moss ditches the bawdy grizzly bear we expect from the character in favour of a quieter, broodier specimen. There are flickers where such an approach is an intriguing take on the forest patriarch, whose drug-fuelled raves have plagued the Wiltshire village of Flintock for more than two decades. But where he loses us is with the suggestion that this man possesses a reign of terror over the local woods, striking fear into the hearts of

the council officers continually trying to evict him. He’s hardly the filthy, vodka-soaked outlaw the play demands; I’ve never seen a gypsy so well coiffed. The West Country accents come by way of most others, and while the supporting characters who bask in Rooster’s wake, ever hopeful for one more line of speed, have their moments, on the whole they crumble under the weight of the undertaking. Michael Clarke and Ali Dunk as Rooster’s sidekicks Ginger and Lee display the most amount of comedic relief, occasionally lifting proceedings, but when the show is more than three hours they can’t keep it alive alone. The trouble with such long plays will always be pacing and energy, both of which in this case slow to points of barely breathing. It would in no way be doing a disservice to Butterworth’s original text to instigate a considerable cut. It would allow the cast to maintain the spirited energy displayed in the opening rave sequence and keep the production on track – I can’t help but feel this one has lost its way.

Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

Noises OFF 16/04/14

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The Limitations of Imitation Adam Foster

Jerusalem is a play ghosted by ancient questions and, in this pale imitation by Minotaur Theatre Company, the legacy of a semi-mythological production. Jez Butterworth’s sprawling play, first seen at the Royal Court in July 2009, won a heap of gongs and had a returns queue to match its running time. Butterworth wrote the part of Johnny “Rooster” Byron for the mercurial Mark Rylance and his performance was widely regarded as one of the finest of the decade. A tough act to follow.

Reviews - Jerusalem

Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca

Benjamin Roger’s production is plagued by a dogged commitment to imitation. From the moment the lights come up on a decrepit caravan and a familiar rendition of William Blake’s “Jerusalem”, there’s a unwelcome feeling of déjà vu. The problem with imitation on a micro budget is its inevitable inadequacy. Better to have a design that looks half decent than opt for a cardboard caravan and a few twigs. It’s an exercise in paint-by-numbers with a cheap brush and watered down paint. In his first editorial for this magazine, Andrew Haydon spoke about the advent of a more “European” sensibility on these shores, but one infused with the detail of British naturalistic acting and the love of a great story clearly told. Jerusalem may be a great story, but it’s a play dying for a production that releases it from the shackles of British literalism. For while it masquerades as a play steeped in dramaturgical convention, it has a flamboyant mysticism surging through its veins. Ditch the sodding caravan, shout the whole thing through megaphones, don animal heads, anything - just don’t bore me unto sleep. Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk

Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

Into The Woods Catherine Love

In the Kingdom of the Blind sets out with a big, bloody (literally) statement of intent. It’s hard to think of a gutsier (again, literally) opening than the live skinning of a (dead) rabbit. In this one striking, wordless scene, with the audience queasily squirming in their seats, Reverend Productions communicate with visceral force our modern disconnect with nature and the dirty, violent reality of survival. This intent, however, remains frustrated for the rest of the subsequent hour, moving around in the same directionless circles as its whining protagonists. The premise itself is intriguing. Three disillusioned strangers have met - ironically - on an internet forum and made a joint pact to turn their backs on society. Armed with little more than a Ray Mears book and some sub-Duke of Edinburgh Award kit, Nick, Krissy and Davis stumble out into the woods, full of vague ideas about space, silence and harmony with the natural world. Unsurprisingly, their idealistic adventure soon becomes a clusterfuck of incompetence, catastrophically unprepared as they are to live off the unyielding fruits of the land. But rather than critiquing the destructive capitalist society from which they have escaped, In the Kingdom of the Blind twists its ankle on every relevant cliché going, the most unimaginative of these being the default love triangle that develops between its bland trio of characters. Two guys, one girl - there’s only one way this can go, right? Occasional, tantalising hints at the lives these individuals have left behind turn out to be narrative red herrings, leaving us frustrated and none the wiser about their motivations. As their ill-fated jaunt into the wild ends as aimlessly as it began, the question left hanging over it all is simply why?

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Are You Experienced? Richard Dennis

I’m sick of all this bullshit at NSDF. Since when did it become acceptable for people to perform shows about things they have no direct experience of? Let’s leave aside the issue of whether or not any of the Americana cast ever grew up gay in South Carolina in a high school (which is totally my fucking business, by the way), and look at some of the other shows so far at NSDF. Your Fragrant Phantom. Did any of you live the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in the 1920s? Did you? Did you? Somehow I doubt it. So what gives you the right to plagiarise their lives for our entertainment? Oh, you did research about their relationship and it’s something you’ve been interested in for years? Big whoop. Sorry, but it’s not possible for you to have any idea about what they experienced or went through, so you should just leave that whole thing well alone. The Duck Pond. Christ, don’t even get me started. I don’t know if any of you are gay, but I believe it’s my right to know, so I can judge for myself how true the central relationship is. I know none of you is Russian, and I know that none of you has the experience of being a duck that transforms into a human at night. But you went and did it anyway, didn’t you? As a result, all we get is some madeup view of what it would be like for a Russian Prince to fall in love with a duck/man mutant, and all potential social realism is jettisoned. What a fucking insult. Jerusalem. OK, so Jez Butterworth based the character of Rooster Byron on a man he knows. I

didn’t see that man onstage during the show, did you? No. So where the actual fuck do you get off pretending to be these characters and pretending to know what it would be like to be them? You’re liars. Big fucking liars. I’m not finished yet. Road. I took it upon myself to do some research, and it turns out that one, just one, of the cast is Northern. I can’t even express in words how disgusting it is to think that middle-class students would dare to try and take on a play about a type of people they’ve never lived with, in a world they’ve never inhabited, set in a time before they were even fucking born. I only hope for your sakes that Chris Thorpe doesn’t find out, cos he’ll be fucking livid. I haven’t seen any of the other shows yet, but with titles such as In the Kingdom of the Blind and Enron, I can’t say I’m particularly hopeful. I mean, Nothing? It’s necessarily impossible to conceive of the concept of nothing, so how the fuck you think you could have the right to do a play about it baffles me.

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The drama we make as students is dismayingly conservative

Painting (c) Laura Gee

What’s “Left” of Student Drama? Billy Barrett

At this moment, anything’s possible. We’re at a stage in our development when we have a group of others who want to collaborate with us for free. What we make together is our decision, untouched by market forces or corporate interests. A captive audience of friends and fellow students will pitch up to whatever we create – and if they don’t like it, they’ll probably still come to our next show. Maybe our university or society gives us slots in a local theatre, or will fund our fledgeling work to play at a festival. Us! Alongside the touring companies, the big names, the people we saw in Edinburgh and loved. Yet too often, the drama we make as students is dismayingly conservative – driven by competition, hierarchy and the obedient imitation of

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“professional” theatre. I’m a student at Warwick, but suspect this will resonate with drama circles across the sector. Competition can be a good thing. Euan Kitson, former president of the Warwick University Drama Society, says “the way our submissions processes work means it feels competitive at times. This can be healthy and keep everyone on their toes, driving people to make challenging and playful work.” And let’s not forget, the pursuit of awards at the end of this week can help push companies to hone the Get the latest news and revews: noff.nsdf.org.uk

most compelling performances.

monopolise. The same voices in a drama scene can dominate and dictate the rules of the game, sidelining less experienced people and work that challenges the received structure of theatremaking. We should remember none of us really know what we’re doing, and do our best to amplify new voices and switch up roles.

On the flip side, competitiveness can create a toxic atmosphere of one-upmanship, stifling productive collaboration and meaningful critical exchange. Discussing this paradox yesterday, Catherine Love reminded me of Made in China’s Gym Party, in which the company play with our “brilliant, terrible The neoliberal landscape The pressure to desire to win”. What begins outside our campuses provide a professional- perpetuates the culture I’m as participatory games quickly turns ugly, and as describing. Public funding is quality experience audience members we are even more fiercely fought-over often comes at the made complicit in celebrating than drama society money, winners and punishing losers. expense of taking risks and arts jobs are increasingly No one’s hurling abuse or precarious. This has left too giving each other nosebleeds many of us dully preoccupied in student drama, but we’re often too quick to with CV-filler, compiling joyless lists of jobs indulge in snide schaudenfreude over nurturing undertaken to demonstrate transferrable skills discussion; individual advancement over shared or a regional theatre credit. But as young people development. aspiring to enter this industry, we have a duty to blast apart that culture with weapons of mass Some people say competition’s a human instinct. creation. Student drama’s a playground as well I think that’s pseudo-Darwinian, capitalist bullshit, as a training ground, and at this early stage we’re but then I’m a theatre kid and not a cultural allowed – indeed required – to challenge the old theorist. Regardless, it’s a reality of how we trends and structures we’re learning about, falling come by funding and performance opportunities over as we do so. in student drama. While this can motivate us to pitch our best work, often such processes leave We should be making the drama we want to, even cash in the hands of the “safest” shows: the team if it ends up an unmitigated clusterfuck, because, who choose a well-known play, who trot out a like NSDF, this moment is finite. Hold onto the list of “influences” to prove a production’s worth. slapdash, hopeful amateurism that can drive us Fearful of making a financial loss or damaging right now, because we’ll have to remember it when relationships with professional venues, we push our work (hopefully) becomes “work”. I hope some the projects that look like the theatre that’s already of this resonates with people, and that others being made. violently disagree (hey, this isn’t a competition) – but let’s keep talking about this over the coming Of course our practice should be informed by week. professionals – they got where they are for a reason, and we’re here at this festival to learn from the best. But the pressure to provide a professional-quality experience often comes at the expense of taking risks or running with our own left-field ideas. The obsession with experience is also internal, sometimes leading to stale, top-down organisation – drama “triangles” rather than circles. Making a name for yourself as a student practitioner is important, but as in any free market, people Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk

A Total Culture Secretary

Sajid Javid, Culture Secretary, in his ongoing series about his experiences at NSDF. As told to Richard Dennis. While I must be extremely intelligent and multitalented to have been both a successful investment banker and now the Secretary of State for Culture, I’m also pretty modest, which is why, on hearing that Punk Rock was a play about pupils at a British secondary school, I thought I’d ask my fellow cabinet minister Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, to offer his thoughts: “Greetings, children. Be seated. My name is Mr Gove, and as the Secretary of State for Education, it is my responsibility to ensure that you are all educated to the standard that your parents and betters in society expect, nay, demand. This is for your own good. Children must be prepared for life after school and university, which means providing them with the curriculum and qualifications they need to ensure the continued economic prosperity of the British Empire. For the past hundred years, the British education system has been lead dangerously astray. Modern ideas to do with child welfare and socialism have eroded away at the heart of what education is, namely the teaching of facts. Facts, facts, facts. This is why I recently announced that a number of arts-based subjects are to be reformed as rigorous, demanding and world-class new GCSEs and A levels from 2016. (No really, he did. -ed.) One of those subjects in desperate need of reform is drama, and I can think of no stronger evidence for this than the performance of Punk Rock that I witnessed last night. The play is about a group of pupils at a grammar school about to take their A levels. On the surface, this would be an excellent chance to demonstrate through the medium of theatre the importance to children of paying attention at school and studying hard. Instead, this Simon Stephens “writer”, has created a perverted and disgusting script, that puts foul language in the mouths of innocent babes, idolises teenage sex, and glorifies terrorism. This would be bad enough on its own, but the fact that a teacher at Artsed Sixth Form, a teacher in our education system no less, felt it was appropriate

to expose the children under his ward to this kind of filth beggars belief. I can only shudder at the thought of how these pupils must have been traumatised partaking in this play, uttering words and indulging in sexual deviancy the likes of which would never have occurred to them in a wholesome school environment. The fact that it is possible for children to be taught this kind of thing in schools is exactly why we so desperately need reform. We in this country have a glorious tradition of fine plays, and my fear is that they will be lost in a flood of talentless, corrupting modern influences. What’s wrong with Shakespeare? Marlowe? Chaucer? Does anything else need to be said about the human condition and the ideal society, beyond what these visionaries wrote? Of course not. If children are to learn about the arts, they must be taught the objective facts, not these wishy-washy socialist views that plant the infected seeds of relativism and subjectivity in their fragile minds. Shakespeare is good. Dickens is good. Samuel Johnson is good. The First World War was good. Simon Stephens is bad. And so, on viewing this “performance” of Punk Rock, I have decided to double my efforts in making sure that we in the Conservative government protect our children from nefarious and insidious external influences, that we create a curriculum that teaches them the facts they need to know about the arts so that they can get a proper job after university, and that we eradicate any trace of imagination from our education system, as it clearly only leads to trouble. Class dismissed.”

Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk