Thoughts on Your 2016?

Bit late to the game on this one (life...) and been away for the last four months (more life...), but nonetheless wanted to stick my oar in and give my two pennies on what I think has been the most remarkable year of theatre – in terms of quality, consistency, innovation and excitement – that I’ve seen in my time regularly theatregoing. I can’t think of a previous year with as many shows which excited, inspired and wowed me in such a profound way as this year – and that’s just 9 months! I also can’t think of a year where the worst shows have been as interesting – it’s possible I missed some absolute clunkers, but these shows aren’t as objectionable or evil as previous years’ worst. So briefly (as brief as I can be) my best and worst of this wonderful year (wonderful for theatre – for everything else...):

Worst:

3) Remember reading/seeing Doctor Faustus and thinking “Using all the powers of hell for dark arts, deep power, personal gain and fulfilling all desires – pfft, I’d become a TV magician instead!”? Me neither. Remember reading/seeing Doctor Faustus and thinking “Are we meant to feel sympathy for this devil? If only someone could give me some musical cue!”? Me neither. Teevan’s new script felt like a sitcom pilot; Lloyd’s lowest-common-denominator direction plods with the old and struggles with the new so much that even Jenna Russell and Jade Anouka can’t save it. I was actually quite bored by most of it (Teevan made Faust a boring character, and even Mephistopholes mostly just stood there and complained), and intellectually insulted by the rest; Teevan’s script is the dullest new play of the year, and Lloyd’s direction the clumsiest revival.

2) Had wonder.land been a movie, it would be tempting to lump it alongside Troll 2, The Room and The Wicker Man as a cult movie, ‘so-bad-it’s-good’. I was playing a mental drinking game – drink any time the music, dialogue or teenage angst is embarrassing – and by the end I was mentally sh*tfaced. Oh, to have actually had a drink with me... I was almost rolling in the aisles by the end – were they really going to make that clunky rhyme, hit that horrible note, say this ludicrous script? Yes, yes, yes, and with such confidence and bravado and pride that (to make a better Lewis Carroll comparison than these three (three!) writers came up with) we were almost through the looking glass, where bad was good and this was thus five stars. The extraordinary Dusty managed this feat; the gloriously ridiculous How To Hold Your Breath managed it in part; wonder.land almost did. But then I remember the angle this took. This hated its characters. This wasn’t simply a fun disaster, it was a tasteless one: it made fun of Ali and her father for being addicts, spoke down to teenagers, mocked their literacy and their street smarts and their academic potential, assumed any teenager’s IQ was barely in double figures, treated a bogstandard internet forum like it was HAL in 2001, made younger people into phone-reliant dunderheads and adults into pathetic philistines, treated internet users as loners and weirdos and then went to laugh at these people for being lonely and weird, made fun of people with serious problems because of their problems... It’s actually more like the original Reefer Madness, sincerely outraged about modern times, and this sincere internet-phobia and mocking of damaged, lonely, troubled characters gave this its really nasty edge. And Albarn’s music is just unpleasantly unlistenable. Almost hilariously terrible – but its judgemental sneer and bitter aftertaste makes it just unpleasantly so.

1) Other people found much to praise in this, it’s appeared in some people’s ‘best of’s here, and Sophie Melville is indisputably the actress of the year (challenged solely by the goddess Isabelle Huppert, similarly stuck in an otherwise terrible show, and by Harriet Walter’s superb resolution to five years of stunning Shakespearean performances): so why is Iphigenia in Splott my worst show of the year? Well, I couldn’t see it as a cry for the underclass – I saw it as a cry AT the underclass, or perhaps a cry at the middle-class whilst the underclass looked on, unrepresented. Or I saw it as our dear Parsley saw Wish List: “It's a chance for middle class audiences to indulge in poorly portrayaled social inequality porn”. That mattered. Well-intentioned though it may be, its hugely misjudged tone renders it an absolute failure, and one whose arch theatricality doesn’t just subjugate its politics but completely overwhelms them and completely undermines it. It’s about drawing this arch link between the Euripidean tragedy and Effie’s contemporary crisis, and to me it’s much more about the former than the latter, interested in Effie not as an example of the underclass but an example of an Aeschylean archetype from whom Owen can wring contrived, poverty-porn drama. The plot of Effie’s tragedy was cliché – working-class fetishism followed by that surreptitiously sexist misery porn (making her suffer to make a point, then neglecting the character's emotional response for its author's political digression instead (in short, what Megan Vaughan said) – and rather than ever truly delve into Effie’s life, her normality, her psyche (in the way that, say, Pests did so well when it was so underrated some years ago), it maintained Effie at arm’s length.

And that’s the issue – it wasn’t a political play for 2016 because it was a rallying cry to fight Tory cuts and defend those rendered defenceless by political neglect; it was a political play for 2016 because it was written for Gary Owen’s bubble. It felt like a person sharing an Owen Jones article on Facebook – and like Owen Jones’ articles, it was written very much about its political victim, not for them. Melville was stunning, and she should be an awards-garlanded star after this – and it’s because of how convincing she was around the material that I felt that if Effie saw this herself, she would be offended at how it didn't want us to help her, but to contemplate the analogy of the ancient Iphigenia; then Gary Owen's politics; THEN Effie. And that trickle-down of sympathy was a misjudgement in major terms. Compare, say, to this year’s I Daniel Blake – that movie was all about honestly looking alongside marginalised characters into their world; Iphigenia in Splott was about looking AT this marginalised character from our very theatrical world, thus further marginalising her. And given what its final line was – to misquote, “What will you do when we won’t take it?” – not only was Owen aware of this, he was intending it. That says it all – 90 minutes in Effie’s company, and we’re still meant not to empathise with but to fear her – ‘we’ being the converted to whom Gary Owen archly, anciently preaches. I agree with its politics, but I disagree with the slapdash, self-satisfied, smug, sneering, sidelining way it fetishised, patronised and over-theatricalised Iphigenia first and Effie second. It’s slacktivism.

Unlike previous years, I don’t absolutely hate these shows. Last year’s Truth Lies Diana was as objectionable as any artwork can get (a piece which only gets worse the more one contemplates it). This year’s Iphigenia in Splott was simply a good idea badly, badly, very badly executed. But this year’s good, mind you, have been very good...

So if I rambled about the shows I didn’t like (but which I respect – three admirable, interesting failures; but three total tasteless failures nonetheless), just wait until I get to the shows I love. These seven shows are seven contenders for the best show I’ve ever seen, for such different reasons – powerful, progressive, profound, these are eight shows that, after time to absorb what they say, only prove themselves even richer, even deeper, and even more wonderful than they were when they blew me away at the time I saw them.

In alphabetical order, my top seven shows/joint best show of the year:

Chekhov’s First Play – The best piece of theatre about theatre I have ever seen. No step of the creative process – from writing and abandoning, to directing and interpreting, to acting and pretending, to watching and believing – was left unexplored; somehow this 70 minute (!) show managed to tackle all these themes with insight and originality. Yet far from an intellectual scattershot study of how we make theatre, this is also one of the most humane and heartfelt studies of why we make theatre, our human need for theatre. It didn’t say anything about the creative process to be arch or intellectual; it said it to say something about humanity. Writing as thinking out loud; directing as understanding; reviving as reliving; acting as being; watching as empathising; SO SO SO much more, and so much more considered... When I think back on it, I either recall something new and fascinating it said about how we make a play, interpret a play and believe in a play; or I recall when they had to burst into that great Nick Cave song and its final message of hope, and I begin to cry. I hope someone else here saw it, and I hope it returns to be seen by many more. No show has ever tackled so much about theatre with such success or wit or insight; but none has ever had such a large loving heart either.

The Encounter – Where McBurney goes, we can but follow. I genuinely don’t know where to begin with this. Like his Master and Margarita, it’s a show I know will wake me up in the middle of the night in years to come, as more and more I find something new in it. Perhaps its greatest genius came in its beginning, in one almost incidental moment – the photo taken of us beforehand. In that, McBurney makes McIntyres of us. He creates a record of us starting our encounter; he then takes us to experience whatever we organically/inorganically, sensibly/nonsensically encounter; and then like the monkey with the camera he destroys all records and evidence, so it’s down to us and interpretation and anecdote alone to recount our encounter, whatever that may have been – and due to illusions of extraordinary reality, that’s quite some encounter we’re given to tell.  And this is McBurney just getting started. That’s just one thing. It’s also very much about thought and perception: the impossibility of making a narrative of the former, and the easy manipulation but wonderful necessity of the latter. And it’s about a thousand philosophical, fantastical, swashbuckling, sensitive more subjects, many of which I’ll only discover when I’ve relived my encounter in my mind a few more times. For me, the enduring theatrical image of the year is that of the end, of McBurney holding his daughter and telling her a story – it’s a profoundly moving, sensitive and caring concluding image, ending philosophy and fantasy with family and home. It’s also an image that never actually happened – but so powerful was this illusion that, as I relive my encounter with this Encounter, it did. That’s remarkable. As it circles through my memories again and again, I can’t wait to see what my next encounter with it reveals. What a show.

Faith Healer – Brian Friel was a genius, and this may be his masterpiece – a complex, haunting, mysterious riddle about why we believe. With her tremendous cast of true greats, Turner had one key directorial flourish, which was to take these short stories and turn them into duologues, albeit ones in which we are silent yet still culpable collaborators (friends? Psychologist? Conscience?) to Friel’s haunted, damaged storytellers. This gives the characters a wounded depth that’s so insightful; it also forces us to confront Friel’s masterful mystery head-on, and live with it personally. Friel wrote a masterpiece of storytelling; Turner turned it into a masterpiece of loneliness and accountability. It’s haunted me so much since, I wish I didn’t love it as much as I did.

The Flick – Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Baker’s remarkable script is that it’s all about the inartistic, portrayed in an inartistic way. Working isn’t cinematic, friendships aren’t cinematic, farewells aren’t cinematic – and by making her hero a cineaste, then setting this in a cinema (then locating her cinema in a theatre), Baker forces comparison between watching someone silently sweep up popcorn and the action of Avatar. And this inartistic honesty makes The Flick one of the most artistic, action-packed pieces of work I’ve seen – one in which (as with her wonderful Circle Mirror Transformation) great drama is simple empathy with everyday life. It’s not some platitudinous piece about the drama of normal lives – I think it’s got more to say, and is also a deep and extraordinary play about art and modernity and changes and reality – but mostly what I took away is it depiction of normal life, wonderfully portrayed. Through the empathetic construction of three of the most heartbreakingly broken yet externally normal characters you could hope to see on stage, this isn’t a platitudinous piece about the great drama of normal lives, but an impossibly complex play about impossibly complex inner lives, playing out between the ordinariness of work and the extraordinariness of blockbusters, elevated by an understanding production by Sam Gold and pitch-perfect performances from one hell of a trio. So relatable is it that I find myself referring to it on an almost daily basis – in awkward small-talk with near-strangers at work, or during any awkward overlong silence, I often wonder who the person opposite me is underneath, were Annie Baker to have written them. And quite possibly, laugh-for-laugh, the funniest play of the year too. Whenever I think back on this, I get a rush of hope.

If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me – Given that everyone involved in making this refers to it as more of a pop concert than a dance/theatre show, I’ve begun to wonder if anyone involved actually realised what a strong political statement they were making with this, or if I just read too much into Jane Horrocks’ jukebox. Nonetheless, it was a wittily aggressive statement about living through the worst of the 1980s, and the depressing legacy that followed; that political and personal pain inflicted then has its scars in how we live and love now. Through very literal but very enjoyable choreography, a fairly haunting set-list, and Horrocks’ ballsy performance and presence throughout, I think this show said more about the cultural and political relationship between Thatcherism and Cameronism (the legacies of the former and the failures of the latter) than any play by James Graham or Steve Waters or Gary Owen ever could. I was also profoundly moved by its central conceit that love is all you need – rather than the usual cliché, though, this says love will see us through the worst of the worst of our political world, and in this year in particular that’s proven a particularly helpful message. And it said all this, somehow, through merely the medium Little Voice belting out The Smiths. I still hate The Smiths. I loved this show.

In The Heights – Is Hamilton better than this? CAN Hamilton be better than this? This has a simple intention – to tell normal stories of normal people with music as their lingua franca – and like Meet Me In St Louis, it does this perfectly, using songs to elevate ordinary lives into extraordinary art, and convey the extraordinary eternal depth of ordinary everyday emotions. And yet it’s not so simple. Miranda’s a better dramatist than that. The complexity of Nina’s position is told from all angles without easy answers; the sympathy given to Usnavy and Victoria’s relationship says something Shakespearean about what, in lesser hands, would just be soapy; Usnavy's final monologue is so brilliantly written it manages to bring such depth into something so simple as moving house and moving on. And whilst Miranda’s score is buzzing with vivacity to begin with, Sheppard’s production is so brimming with passion and youth and energy and love and fun that at one point I genuinely said out loud “I love this show”. Between this cast with that energy and the joy absolutely overflowing, and Miranda’s strength as a dramatist, and its dramatis personae of surprising dimensions, it was like shot after shot of adrenaline and pheromones; every time I think back on it, it energises me to remember just how lovely it was.

Les Blancs – “In a great play, everyone is right”. In Les Blancs, Hansberry dares to write as if this is the case, despite her colonising cast of characters clearly being in the wrong – and that’s where it gets its power. This wasn’t just an extraordinarily comprehensive insight into the immediate evils of colonialism and the worldwide cultural legacy thereof. In the complexity of Sapini’s uncertain titan, it’s a statement about how easily righteous views can be challenged as wrong; in the self-doubt of white-guilt do-gooders it’s a sensitively uncertain study of what doing good actually means; and in the self-confidence of those enjoying the empire’s legacy, it’s a statement about how easy awful views are to believe and uphold. Few playwrights have the talent to write this many characters with this level of complex individuality, yet Hansberry’s willingness to humanise her worst characters whilst equally criticising her best makes this lost masterpiece is just that – a masterpiece. Anyone can write a play that says ‘Racism is wrong’; Hansberry wrote a play that says “A little too much self-doubt here and too much self-confidence there and ‘colonisation’ becomes ‘empire’ and bad becomes good”. So in writing a play about nostalgia for when the country was great, the difficulty of proving black lives matter, journalists writing about what people want to hear and not the truth, and entitled racists blagging their way to power, well, you can finish this thought... Farber knows this is THE play for 2016, but doesn’t let on – a lesser director would overdo the speechifying or overplay the contemporary resonances, but Farber starts by keeping her contemporary cards close to her chest, letting the characters develop, and only giving us hints of the anger we’re later going to feel. And boy does it make us feel angry. As an incredibly insightful and comprehensive historical overview, Hansberry makes us angry; as a 1960s set story with lines all too contemporary, Farber make us angry. As such it becomes a three-hour slow build of extraordinary emotion; accompanying astonishing monologues with unforgettable tableaus, Farber ignited a spark that became a furious fire of anger that’s yet to be extinguished. And whilst he’s not famous enough to get the Olivier, was there a better performance than Danny Sapini?

“Briefly”, I said... I make no apologies for rambling (particularly as I hope that if enough people talk about Chekhov’s First Play, some producer will give it a substantial run – and I’m desperately hoping someone else on here saw it and will join me in singing its praises). Intellectually I admire every one of these shows to no end; emotionally I adore them. Seven of the best shows I have ever seen. A better, more consistent set of shows is impossible to draw up. What a year.

A belated Happy New Year and Merry Christmas and all that to the wonderful board – particularly to everyone who made it possible a year ago and makes it possible now, but generally to the lot of you who are generally wonderful! It’s been over a year now, hasn’t it? Happy Board Birthday! Here’s to many more meetings, and very best wishes for 2017! We’ll need it...