Category Archives: Guardian

Theatrical Expressionism in the Guardian

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During the past few weeks a few pieces on expressionism in the theatre have run in the Guardian‘s theatre blog; today, Matt Trueman follows up on Michael Billington’s post of 29 November, in which Billington concluded that expressionism “is alive and well and seems to chime with our own soul-searching, hysteria and sense of crisis.”

Trueman is more interested in tracing expressionist effects in “ostensibly naturalistic theatre,” but these effects seem to be technical only rather than born in the theatrical vision. He cites especially the contemporary focus in some theatre on the exaggeration of physical gestures and off-kilter set design: all too true, but the trend towards expressionism is philosophical and cultural as well. I began a series of posts on the assumptions underlying this New Expressionist theatre — a term coined by David Ian Rabey about ten years ago — on 18 October here.

Money matters

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A night at the theatre: Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company's 2009 revival of Caryl Churchill's Serious Money

UPDATE (5 AUGUST): Up to 103 comments now, and Ms. De Sisto’s response? “It seems that Bank of America can’t, in fact, spare one of their 300,000 global employees to reply any time soon to any of the points raised (many of which were great: thanks for that),” writes Guardian editor Andrew Dickson. “I guess you can draw your own conclusions about how seriously they take the project of improving cultural understanding if they can’t find time to get involved.”

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It’s bracing to hear from a corporate executive on corporate arts funding: that is, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Rena De Sisto in yesterday’s Guardian. Ms. De Sisto, identified as a “global arts and culture representative,” offers a few rare thoughts from her businessperson’s perspective as government funding for the arts in the UK is now under the knife, and discusses rather specifically how the company perceives its role as a supporter of the arts. Ms. De Sisto writes:

Companies have many people to answer to – shareholders among them – and must extract sound business benefits, such as access for employees, brand visibility and client outreach opportunities. … That said, companies have an obligation not to interfere in artistic matters. And more companies need to learn what support for the arts can do for their company. These may include connecting to existing or potential customers; creating benefits for employees; providing arts education to tomorrow’s workforce; being a good corporate citizen; creating a more culturally aware society; enriching the community it is doing business in. Or perhaps all of these things.

Noble words, as is Ms. De Sisto’s  assertion that the reconceived financial services giant recognizes that it has “a vested interest in improved cultural understanding. In fact, one of the most compelling reasons for corporations to invest in the arts is its power to create greater cultural understanding. Problems of economic stability, standards of living, the environment, peace and prosperity among nations and peoples all require a foundation of cultural understanding and tolerance to progress towards solutions.” (Ms. De Sisto, by the way, sits on the board of Opera America, so I suppose revivals of Fidelio and La Boheme must push these noble goals along somehow. I enjoy these operas too, but how either of them will be efficacious in mitigating diesel emissions or providing a solution to the civil wars in Darfur is beyond me, as I assume it would be beyond Beethoven and Puccini.)

We should be glad that Ms. De Sisto contributes to a transparency, to use that benighted word, of a corporation’s motivations for arts giving, even if it provides little comfort to artists who have a less instrumental conception of the arts. And from her perspective, it’s hard to argue with. True, a corporation’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders, and she outlines the obligations that inhere to that responsibility. She also rather lightly treads over the question of “an obligation not to interfere in artistic matters”: indeed. And the best way to meet that obligation is to maintain an arm’s-length attitude to any work or company that might mitigate the corporation’s desire to connect to their customers, create new employee benefits or even “enrich a community.” Better not to fund at all, than to dictate aesthetics.

Community is yet another benighted word, which will have different meanings to corporations, governments and individuals. To the immediate point, a “community” to a corporation is a market: a pool of existing and potential customers; so is the audience, then, for the art work.

I wish I could work up an angry anti-capitalist rant here, but there’s not much point, especially when the left-progressive lukewarm-socialist community shares so many similar goals for art — arts education, economic stability, hand-wringing concern for “the environment,” a more culturally-aware society (whatever that is) and of course cultural understanding and tolerance. Very nice. Wiser minds than mine are on the subject, as the nearly 90 comments on the post (at this hour) attest. As I’m currently fundraising for What She Knew, I read this with some amusement, but little hope that sexy Jocasta, as she ecstatically straddles her son’s loins, bears his children then stabs herself in her womb, will much appeal to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s executives, though I suppose I could be wrong. I am most reminded here, as I prepare for this eight-performance run (total potential BAML customers: 400, if we sell out every night) in December, of British dramatist John Whiting’s words, which seem to have a vague application to the issue:

No art exists by any man’s favour. Public entertainment certainly does so, but art exists in its own right as something worth doing for its own sake. A play, like any other created work, must have the arrogance of its convictions. …

A playwright must not think that he will extend his audience beyond that of the novel or poetry. It was a mistake to see the theatre as a popular art. It may have been fifty years ago, but new mediums have changed all that. The play must now be directed towards a specialised audience. That may well be the theatre’s salvation. … In all ways it must become smaller, but more concentrated.

Bloomsday on WBAI, and other reading

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Writing to be read: James Joyce in 1926 (photo by Berenice Abbott)

Rhys Tranter alerts me to this year’s Radio Bloomsday, a live broadcast from the studios of New York’s WBAI next Wednesday, 16 June 2010. A 32-year WBAI tradition, this year’s reading of texts relating to James Joyce’s Ulysses will include performances by (according to the event’s blog here):

Jerry Stiller, Alec Baldwin, Paul Muldoon, Charles Busch, Paul Dooley, Marc Maron, Bob Odenkirk, John O’Callaghan, Jaason Simmons, Brian O’Doherty, Aaron Beall, Amy Stiller, T. Ryder Smith, James Kennedy, Emily Mitchell, Bob Dishy, Judy Graubart, Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher, Richard Maxwell, Tory Vasquez, Barbara Vann, Anna Goodman-Herrick,Tara Bahna-James, Mara McEwin, Zeroboy, Merideth Finn, Mac Barrett, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, Rosie Goldensohn, Barika Edwards and many more.

Listeners across the country and around the world will be able to hear the broadcast live through the WBAI Web site. It begins on 16 June at 7.00pm Eastern time and runs through 2.00am the following day.

This is in addition to the annual Symphony Space Bloomsday-on-Broadway event, which this year will focus on the parallels between the Joyce novel and Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem which inspired Ulysses. Performers at the uptown Peter Jay Sharp Theatre include Stephen Colbert, Colum McCann, Marian Seldes, John Shea, Tony Roberts, Dana Ivey, Stephen Lang, Malachy McCourt, Fritz Weaver, Jonathan Hadary, Lois Smith, David Margulies, Cynthia Harris, Jefferson Mays, Harris Yulin, and Damian Woetzel.

All this speaking-aloud of a book meant to be read in silence (at least, that’s the way most of us read it, though it’s true that reading it aloud can be quite a thrill)! As opposed to those that aren’t, which are under discussion at the Guardian‘s “Noises Off” blog today, taking up where Alison and I left off here. Writes Chris Wilkinson:

Of course, to say that plays are literature does not mean that a critic should be able to ignore the production (as so many reviewers do with new plays). Neither does it mean that a play has to be conventionally literary — not every writer needs to have stage directions like the one at the end of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: “Having found his song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath … he is free to soar above the environs that pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.”

Yet the fact that they exist as printed texts that can be read surely makes them literature by definition? And the value of reading scripts is self-evident in some of the most radical contemporary drama — you only have to look at how plays such as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis or Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life are laid out on the page in order to grasp this.

“Are plays proper literature?”

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… asks David Jays in today’s Guardian. I’m rather with “zauberberg” in the comments section when she or he says, “I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling.”

But more, they’d pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-as-text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays’ question in my own contribution to the issue, “The Booking of the Play” — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now.

But in brief: are plays literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It’s just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they’re very bad literature indeed.



Michael Billington puts up his dukes

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The recent announcement that the Broadway production of Lucy Prebble’s Enron will close this Sunday unleashed rare vitriol from the pen of the Guardian‘s Michael Billington today. Apart from some harsh words (including “obtuse”) for the review of the show from New York Times‘ chief critic Ben Brantley, Billington is more exercised about Broadway in general:

[One] reason for the attacks is the entrenched American view that visual pyrotechnics and razzle-dazzle are the special province of the musical. Plays, on the other hand, are judged by their fidelity to what a critic once called “the visible and audible surfaces of everyday life.” It’s permissible for Wicked or Legally Blonde to deploy expressionist techniques but, on Broadway at least, plays are expected to conform to the realist rules. …

If the melancholy saga of Enron proves anything, it is Broadway’s irrelevance to serious theatre. It is simply a big, gaudy commercial shop-window where fortunes can be won and lost; and I’ve long argued that the beating heart of American theatre is to be found in Chicago, from which a truly terrific American play, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, recently emerged. Next time an ambitious producer thinks of taking a London hit play to Broadway, I’d suggest they ask themselves one simple question: is your journey really necessary?

With the rumored transfer of Jez Butterworth’s highly-regarded Jerusalem, which recently concluded a successful West End run, to Broadway soon, it will be interesting to see if Billington’s dismay is well-founded (though from all reports Jerusalem is as realist as … well, as August: Osage County). Meanwhile, off-Broadway, MTC is now previewing the American premiere of That Face, the Olivier-nominated debut work from British playwright Polly Stenham.

Though Brantley (and the Times generally) has the reputation of being somewhat Anglophilic, this Anglophilia I think has been rather limited to only a few Brits — Tom Stoppard, Martin McDonough, and perhaps a few others. Obviously it doesn’t extend to Lucy Prebble; will it extend to Butterworth and Stenham? Only the future can tell; in the meantime, Billington’s full article is here.