Land of our Fathers at Trafalgar Transformed

“You don’t want to become an artist, it’s a miserable existence”, says one grime-covered miner to the other. After an electrical explosion they’re trapped over a thousand feet under ground. They’re running out of food and water. “Miserable”, agrees the other. “Look at Van Gogh.” A beat. “Wanker.” Banter in spite of desperation that’s what Chris Urch’s first full-length play, Land of Our Fathers, which has now transferred into Trafalgar Studios, does best. What’s more, the funny lines and quips usually dig at something quite profound.

Even though we are in a collapsing mine in 1979, Land of Our Fathers is not an on the nose “politics in the mine”-play. Rather, Urch goes the indirect way and for example looks at the miners’ relationships with women (sisters, wives, girlfriends, with soon-to-be PM Thatcher only mentioned in passing) to show at how loss of labour and emasculation are interlinked. The future is taking shape around these miners and it poses a threat to old modes of manhood, brotherhood and camaraderie.

The idea of one of the characters escaping from his rural Welsh hometown to a London art school is set against the constant undercurrent of the shared experience of singing and music not as abstract art but as a real and comforting life-line among the mining community. Not all the themes of the play are as delicately balanced as this one and the production, first presented at Theatre 503 last year, maybe bites off a little too much as it puts its six characters into a pressure cooker: two brothers (a disparate pair, Lyle Rees as Curly and Taylor Jay-Davies as Chewy), a Polish war veteran, a brusque deputy, a craggy near-pensioner and a musical enthusiast who’s still wet behind the ears.

Charging from hope to despair and bouncing between jokes and accusations, the performers bring out the edges of their characters very effectively. It takes two and a half hours for these edges to hack away at the initial levity and for the men’s relationships, just like their surroundings, to collapse into utter chaos. With increasingly slimmer chances of rescue, the survival instinct rears its ugly head and it’s gruelling and captivating to watch how these men take each other apart. Robert East’s subtle performance as the quiet Hovis injects a composed stoicism that pulls focus into the human drama.

Enhanced by Simon Slater’s soundscape, Signe Beckmann’s design sees the small studio space transformed into a pit. Walls, ceiling and floor are covered with rough black textures turning the stage into a suffocating coal tunnel. Yet, there’s life in this uninhabitable death trap: soot-covered faces and torsos of the men that move around, orange jackets crumpled in corners and unlikely songs despite everything.

The slow build of the piece and a few predictable conflict developments sometimes stand in the way of its ambitions but Paul Robinson’s direction keeps the play’s pulse beating. However, the energy levels of some of the latter sections are perhaps less purposefully paced and therefore some of the motivations behind the longer monologues remain vague. Still, this doesn’t detract from Urch’s distinct voice which is able to create authentic characters and a remarkable historical and thematic scope within a limited setting.

Quiet Pop-Up Revolution

Just two people having a conversation, no props, no set – Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs is clever (life-altering discussions in IKEA-clever), funny (rambling, self-interrupting monologues with ecological self-awareness funny) conversations in the plural and I’m utterly absorbed in the quick to-and-fro, the quips and all the linguistic intricacies of Macmillan’s writing.

I’m sitting in the Roundabout, Paines Plough’s new pop-up theatre, and George Perrin’s staging in the space exposes the rhythm of the piece in a way that almost makes me forget that there is no scenery. Lucy Osborne and Emma Chapman are the two designers behind this new versatile venue. The gap the Roundabout attempts to fill in the theatre landscape is quite considerable. The collaborative design process had the team battle with technical advancements and saw them challenge concepts of regional touring, community involvement and pop-up culture to champion new writing. After all, that’s what Paines Plough has been doing for the last 40 years.

Some of the best ideas have started out as doodles on napkins and James Grieve’s and George Perrin’s vision for the Roundabout is no exception. “On the back of a receipt for dinner or something, they literally wrote ‘pop-up theatre’, 10 m square, and then they did a little drawing of a circle, put in a little square, they went, it’s this high and all of that… and none of it is what we ended up doing but that was what I got.” Osborne’s first ever design job was on The Long and the Short and the Tall in Sheffield directed by Josie Rourke. Grieve was the associate director on the show and later, when Rourke and Grieve worked at the Bush, Lucy became an associate artist there and a strong work relationship was formed. Looking at some of her previous work, Osborne describes it as being guided by “thinking about the architecture of the space and about the relationship between the audience and the actor who stands in the middle of the playing space, it’s a very pure way of designing a show.” With new writing in particular it makes perfect sense to get rid of all the extra baggage and just focus on the acting and the language but that insight was hard-earned for the theatre designer.

In 2012 she teamed up with Grieve again for a 21-week mammoth tour of the Mike Bartlett piece Love Love Love and they became frustrated quickly with the rigours of national touring. “It was three different box sets with two intervals and it was the same cast in three completely different time periods. So it was 1967, 1997 and the present day. There was tons of scenery, it was huge and we were touring to such disparate venues that everywhere it went it was so enormously compromised.”
When Grieve and Perrin first took over Paines Plough as artistic directors, they had started a dialogue about touring new theatre with regional audiences. The most important feedback they got was that audiences just wanted to see what was going on. “They were so used to being sat on the flat with the actors in front of them and not really being able to see what was going on. It seems like such a simple request. ‘Please can we just see what’s going on?'”

The look of the Roundabout with its metal surfaces and colourful seating couldn’t be further away from a black box that asks the audience to pretend the space doesn’t exist. I can’t help but feel that there’s more to it though, a different level of spatial and societal awareness in the project as a whole. The inception of the theatre and how its creators envision it transforming some aspects of regional theatre are indicative of a strong democratic underpinning. To provide the same theatre experience to audiences anywhere, regardless of whether they’re in the Shetlands or in Doncaster, that’s consciously implementing democracy into an artistic context and is far removed from the more reactionary political statements which could be found at this year’s fringe.

Osborne explains to me how architecture of the Roundabout focuses the audience’s attention directly on the performance and on the language of a piece of new writing. “After all, that’s the most important voice in the room”, she says. It all has to do with the triangulation of its structural elements and lighting, I’m told. “The architecture of the round, not only can you see everything that’s going on but because we’re raked you’re also getting an audience reaction as well – you’re constantly tuned in to the whole room in terms of how the audience is feeling in the space.”

When she talks about her inspirations Osborne mentions the Royal Exchange in Manchester or architectural masters like Stephen Jones, who designed the theatre in Scarborough, or Tyrone Guthrie, who designed all of the three-siders in this country. Guthrie had a very reductionist approach as a director. “I feel like I’m putting myself out of a job as a theatre designer here but the idea that you don’t need a design in order to make the play work, Guthrie pioneered this.” The Roundabout team ran with that idea and the result, which following its stint in Edinburgh will go on a mini tour, has been four years in the making. The last time I sat in one of Lucy Osborne’s designs I narrowly avoided getting covered in stage blood (Coriolanus at the Donmar) so the change to an understated space-as-design seems rather radical.

Osborne doesn’t agree: “I always think about the whole space as a totality”. After several prototypes the inaugural season of the theatre presents “plays that have been stripped bare and it’s very much the actors and the words and the space that they inhabit which are telling the story”, Emma Chapman says. She is the chief lighting designer of the Roundabout and has worked on the project pretty much from the beginning. The lighting, like so many aspects of the new space, is quietly revolutionary. Designing a travelling venue that is supposed to be up and running within a day, “you don’t really want lighting fixtures hung in and all these cables. So if you strip all that out and you build the lighting within the ceiling then suddenly you’re not encroaching on that architectural detail of the venue.”

To push the limits of what was possible with LED lighting, Osborne and Chapman convinced Howard Eaton to join in. Eaton and his team, responsible for the magical lift in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Olympic Rings at the 2012 opening ceremony, made some crucial contributions such as additional coding for LED and pixel mapping. How coding and theatre lighting go together and how all of that technology can be packed into a single lorry is a little mysterious but Osborne clarifies: “The key thing is that it’s an incredibly complicated system but at it’s simplest level it’s ten buttons that do warm, cold, blue, yellow, green, white, centre spot, complete theatre.” “You don’t need masses of truss and masses of tools to put it together either”, Chapman adds.

When you only need one day, six people, one supervisor and a couple of Allen keys to build the structure then that’s pretty high on the pop-up-tivity scale. “When you slot one bit on top of the next bit it wants to go down because of gravity. You’ve not actually tightened anything up or screwed anything, every little bit like Lego just slots down into the next bit to create the shape.” However, haven’t we already popped up everything there is to pop up? Isn’t the hype long gone? Osborne assures me that the nature of the Roundabout is more than an end in itself. “I’m interested in the Roundabout because it is actually built on an access of community engagement. The idea of popping something up, creating an audience just for a few weeks or whatever and then taking it all away again… I love the hype, I love the explosion, I love the energy of that but actually I think theatre is about long term engagement with the community and that’s when it’s at its most successful.”

Osborne is still a big believer in theatre buildings to provide training and meaningful community engagement but there is definitely something to be said about the economical impact of pop-ups in a theatre context. Not only does it allow companies more flexible programming when traditional houses are fully booked, it also gives the company the chance to bring high quality productions into more remote areas, or a regional theatre might be able to use the Roundabout for a month and use it like a satellite theatre to send into surrounding areas.

Erected within one day and all the lighting fixtures are hidden, the 168-seater can also be used beyond theatre by the whole community to do takeover: a children’s show in the morning, yoga at noon, workshops in the afternoon and a piece of new writing in the evening, you name it. When Osborne says that she thinks “about the whole space as a totality” then that’s what it means – the future of the Roundabout and its transformative potential for new writing in communities has been built into its design.

 

Originally written for Exeunt’s Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.

According To His Need at C Nova (Edinburgh Fringe)

Bachelor infiltrates socialist party to get laid in this Edinburgh Festival Fringe production.

Show me yours, I’ll show you mine: relationships as transactions are not a new idea and sex often plays a crucial role when partners negotiate their needs. In According To His Need, hobby socialist Nick joins the party to finally score again. He meets the party loyal Cass who wants to elevate Nick’s interest for Che Guevara above that of an ornamental T-shirt decoration.

Hannah Mamalis as Cass makes debatable enunciation choices and as her speeches drips with frustration over the wannabe leftist: her stream of political jargon becomes almost indistinguishable. Michael-David Mckernan copes better with the socialist babble. Although a needy loner, his confusion is charming as his commitment to Cass (and Marx) blossoms and he realises that instating socialist values might not agree with his libido.

The emotional bartering between them exposes the logical flaws that emerge when real people try to apply abstract political theories to their lives. Unfortunately, the play is not a clever allegory on real live political events. Oliver Eagleton’s script seems oddly unaware of socialist core issues like class and labour. Instead it contents itself with a rambling flow of theoretical jargon. Together with Nora Kelly-Lester’s pragmatic direction the show is more lacklustre than revolutionary.

Originally written for The List as part of their Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.

Symphony at Assembly George Square

You don’t have to be a Londoner to get nabakov’s Symphony but if you are, then in between the lines, beats and off-beats of the drum the piece shares a knowing wink that talks of take-away coffee and unlikely beauty among unrelenting hectic. Although there is a different kind of electricity in the air, at the Fringe that London cynicism can get momentarily lost between an unironic “I <3 Edinburgh” tote swung over my shoulder and the morning saunter through the meadows that can get me anywhere in the city without the need to squeeze into a metal tube on rails. This storytelling event with musical interludes is a bit like casual sex – entertaining while it lasts but ultimately it leaves you with little to warm your heart for long. Four performers, dishevelled to varying degrees, give a concert laced with three short plays by young British playwrights.

Symphony is about finding your own story among the advertised illusion of lifestyles, opportunities and pre-written shoulds and woulds. Fluidly slipping in and out of characters or behind the keys, various guitars and the drum kit, the performers are a talented bunch, and especially at the kick-off with Tom Wells’ Jonesy, often manipulating the instruments to comedic effect.

Iddon Jones plays a 15-year old Welsh underdog who gets the PE GCSE blues. It’s all skimpy shorts, adolescent dreams and grinding expectations of lad culture but it also manages to take a witty look at how we measure our own success against expectations we draw from existing narratives. In Jonesy’s case Cool Runnings was his forming narrative, and why not? In Tom Wells: Plays 1 published in 2021 Jonesy will be right next to Jumpers For Goalposts, part of the playwright’s “Young Men and Sports”-Cycle and it will feel like foreplay, an amusing side note to the infinitely superior Jumpers.

A Love Song for the People of London by Ella Hickson makes Symphony slide unashamedly from dick jokes with asthma inhalers to pie-baking Zooey Deschanel admirers on this years’ universal kookiness scale. Bemoaning kindles for ruining chances to flirt and damning fateful brollies for communication mishaps, the players in this menagerie are serenaded by London (in shape of a Brit Pop front man) itself. It’s a great twist, delivering one of the best (musical) moments of the piece – a throbbing soundtrack about chancing your luck. Liam Gerrard plays Alex who bakes pies when he’s anxious and who sniffs his dream girl’s hair on the bus. Alex pathetically rages against the unkind urban spirit who is selective about whose love life he’ll support. Suck it, pie creep! London doesn’t owe you anything.

Striking me as the most genuine in this triad of self-narrating characters are Jack Brown’s mucky pup philanderer, and Katie Elin-Salt, as a woman who knows what she wants. The rise and fall of an urban love story in Nick Payne’s My Thoughts On Leaving You is a funny account of heart break, full of delightful stranger than fiction contrasts – real people meeting in a puddle of wee and trying to create something meaningful out of it.

The show ends on a beautiful chanson note about the City and for a moment the three plays come together under a wicked sound blanket, thickly woven like an urban structure with ideas of fate, predetermination and luck sticking out like passionately moving limbs. Although the unruly punchiness of the piece was highlighted by a crackling soundtrack, surely curtsey of a repeatedly dropped amplifier, the venue hindered the chance to be entirely engrossed in the music festival style art form mix. The raked seating in Assembly’s Bosco Tent is far removed from eyes-closed, swaying in the crowd with an East End microbrewery beer can in hand. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the venue, maybe on that day Symphony was just a love song from the wrong city.

 

Originally written for Exeunt as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2014 coverage.