where are the europeans? (brexit and the british stage)

For all the gnashing of teeth from the literati, it’s not as though the British theatre world has done much to embrace Europe over the course of the past 3 decades. Whilst many a US author (Shinn, Shawn, Mamet, Norris etcetera) has had their day in the sun, the roll call of living European writers who aren’t Irish who have had successful productions is pitiable. It’s a struggle to think of a single playwright who has broken out. The odd play is staged, but Europe’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights remain unknown by the average British theatre practitioner. Noren, Fosse, Lagarce, Bernhard,  Koltes, Bebel, Loher… Ask most theatre practitioners and it’s doubtful they will have come across any of them. For most, Europe still means Brecht, Chekhov and not much more. Any attempt to open cultural vistas, to effect an exchange between the UK and its continental European colleagues has been negligible. Is this because these writers and many more are not much kop? Of course not. It’s probably due to a combination of imaginative and commercial reasons, due to a reluctance to seek out a horizon that doesn’t offer a backstage pass to Hollywood and its rewards. The introspection of the British cultural world, with the privileged linguistic space it believes it occupies, is no more than a reflection of mainstream political practices which have helped to create the circumstances under which the vote of 23 June was effected. 

It’s perhaps worth trying to focus on a couple of the great success stories of British theatre over this period. Firstly, take Sam Mendes, an Oxbridge contemporary of the Cameron gang. Mendes, on the back of his Oxbridge productions, broke through as the great white hope of British theatre in the late 80s. His take on the classics was seen as fresh and invigorating. He soon became the heir apparent to the generation of Hall and Nunn (a generation which it might be said entertained rather more intellectual curiosity). In 1990, Mendes took over the Donmar in Covent Garden. The Donmar had all the trappings of a fringe theatre, subversively planted in the heart of a booming new commercial area, Covent Garden. It had the potential to become one of the most radical, exciting theatre venues in Europe. Instead, it became a space dedicated to astute commercial practice. A thriving ‘boutique’ theatre evolved appealing to an elitist audience. Mendes maintained his reworking of the classics whilst also starting to mine the hyper-lucrative medium of the musical. As a creative theatre space, the Donmar never really got going. Mendes left and ended up directing Bond movies, whilst forming his own transatlantic company which does - you guessed it - classic texts with well-known stars. A more conservative approach to theatre would be hard to imagine. Theatre is always a trade-off between artistic and commercial instincts; Mendes’ career shows where the British emphasis has lain. Texts which might be seen as ‘difficult’ need to wait however many decades is required before they can get the imprimatur of ‘classics’ and be sold to the public on that basis. The notion of theatre as a process of intellectual investigation, an investigation which includes a dialogue with an audience, has been shelved. 

Mendes’ career is only one strand in recent British theatre history. It could be argued that the Donmar has an obligation to meet the bottom line and to put on shows that please the punters. However, it might also be suggested that this is to miss the point of culture, which is not to be a merely commercial vehicle, but a means whereby societies can begin to define themselves and also interact with other cultures. The Royal Court is a theatre which has ostensibly sought to embrace this point of view. Over the past three decades it has consolidated its position as the leading new writing venue in the country, not just for British writers, but also for writers all over the world. Indeed, the Royal Court runs its own “international” department. The exact brief of this department is sometimes hard to gauge. At times it seems like a post-colonial enterprise, as ambassadors from the British writing establishment are sent out to help “develop” playwrights in other countries. On the other hand, it could also be argued that it offers a point of cultural exchange, allowing British audiences to get an insight into what’s going on theatrically in the wider world. 

There are two major problems with the Royal Court’s approach towards international writing. Firstly, as part of its remit is to “develop” writers, this means it tends to work with writers who are still at a formative point in their careers. Much as the idea of Thomas Bernhard attending the Royal Court’s international residency tickles the fancy, the conditions under which the residency is run mean it would never have happened. Great writers don’t require “development”. They need their plays to be staged. However, the Court is more inclined to use the gaps in its scheduling for international writing to promote those writers it has invested in via its international outreach work. This leads to the second problem: that in its avowed mission of ‘development’. The Royal Court has effectively turned its back on the most important plays and playwrights currently writing. It doesn’t want to show the best; it wants to showcase its own good intentions. As a result, one of the few theatre spaces in the capital which might have had the energy to tackle the work of the major contemporary playwrights of Europe and beyond, has failed to do so. Look at the list of plays staged in the main house over the past thirty years and the number of plays from Europe is negligible. The greatest opportunity for dialogue theatre offers - staging plays of significance by great writers - has been forfeited. 

The writer understands that it is unfair to condemn the lack of European theatre within our (European) theatres at the door of either the Royal Court or Sam Mendes. Rather, these two examples have been cited as indicative of how our theatres would appear to have turned their backs on the continent long before 52% of the British population chose to follow suit. This only matters in so far as we choose to believe that culture matters. Had the Court and other British theatres been awash with productions of European playwrights it might not have made the slightest of differences to the political climate. However, if one chooses to believe that culture can have an effect, for better or for worse, on a nation’s consciousness, then it might be reasonable to suggest that the introspective, anglophone attitude of British theatre, regarding itself more as the 51st state of the United States than an active player within a European community, might be at the very least worthy of quiet reflection on the part of our theatre practitioners at a time when the cultural value of belonging to Europe has been so bitterly rejected. 

beneath the plough and the stars

It’s seven in the morning and for some reason I am awake. The night ended in Doyle’s about four hours ago. Young people were falling over each other dancing to James Brown whilst we finally wrapped up the conversation and decided to head for home.

Dublin has a lot of bars and my friend promised we’d end up in one of them. He promised a quiet nook somewhere, in a beautiful bar. There’s nothing wrong with Doyle’s but it’s neither quiet nor beautiful. Which given the context of the occasion is probably far more appropriate. 

My friend is called Sean Holmes. He’s a theatre director. I’ve known him for many years and seen many of his shows, although less of late. Last year, he came to give a workshop in the city were I live, Montevideo, Uruguay. At the end of the last night of the week, in the Plaza Independencia on the way back to the hotel, he said: “Why don’t you come to Dublin? The Abbey’s doing the centenary of the 1916 Uprising and for some reason they’re inviting lots of English directors over for it. I’m going to do The Plough and the Stars.” Standing in the plaza, Dublin and next year seemed a long way away. Nevertheless, a few months later here I am for one night, in time to catch the show’s first preview.

We go for supper before the event In a restaurant called The Winding Stair which overlooks the Liffey. Sean seems relaxed. The first preview is the moment the play finally confronts its audience. It’s opening night by any other name. He tells me that O’Casey’s play is “their Hamlet.” On the fourth night of the show’s opening run, in 1926, there was a riot. The rioters were widows of men who’d died in the 1916 uprising, who didn’t like what O’Casey had to say about it. With Jon Bausor, the designer, we speculate about what it would take to provoke a riot in a theatre today and decide it’s probably never going to happen again. 

In Montevideo, Sean had been giving a workshop with the playwright, Simon Stephens. Collectively, they were tackling the big issues of why people write plays and why they then choose to stage them. One of the exercises that Sean did involved investigating how you transform the theatrical space so that it feels as though the play being staged is actually happening in the same room, or physical space, as the audience. A great deal of theatre looks to separate the audience and the play; Sean was looking at how to integrate them. 

The Plough and the Stars is a play rooted in the geography of Dublin. Dublin’s not the most complex city, geographically. Within a single afternoon, I’d begun to get a handle on it. When O’Casey’s play talks about O’Connell Street, even I know where that is. For the audience, the play has some of the criteria of a video diary. The way in which people mercilessly film or photograph their lives, documenting their actuality. The Plough and the Stars is set in the actuality of Dublin’s geography. A local audience watches it with their own images of this world to hand. It’s not remote, it’s tangible. The only thing distancing the audience from the play is that it’s set in the past. 

Plays set in the past run the risk of being museum pieces. Audiences sometimes prefer this. They enjoy watching a play and feeling as though it belongs to another time; that they are cultural tourists. This might be a valid approach but it doesn’t have much to do with Sean’s exercise about making the audience feel part of the space. In order to achieve this, the director has to find a way to ‘de-museum’ the play. To make it feel contemporary.

We get to the theatre around 7pm. The theatre is sold out. The audience is a mix of young and old. There are several school parties. The doors are not opened until 7.20, ten minutes before the show is due to open. The spectators are crammed into the lobby by the bar. The Abbey is a gloriously unreconstructed seventies space. It wears its heritage lightly on its sleeve. This doesn’t feel like an audience which has come in a spirit of veneration. 

The first image in the production is a girl, aged about 14, wearing a Man Utd top. She approaches a microphone and sings, in Gaelic, what I later learn is the national anthem. The girl is of Pakistani descent. She speaks with a clear Irish accent. She’s the child of immigrants. The audience applaud her as she coughs her way through the song. Dublin, like many a contemporary European city, is a melting pot. One of the languages that I heard recurrently walking around was Portuguese Brazilian. Everyone’s here, on the edge of Europe. Dublin is no longer the white, classically Celtic city of O’Casey’s day. The production reflects this from the off. 

Having said which, modern dress is not the most radical of devices. The play uses costume wittily throughout, but the key tools in the director’s unlocking of the text are song and surprise. The character of Jack, Nora’s husband, might be said to be underwritten. Jack has one big scene before he goes off to join the militia and another midway through the battle of the Easter Uprising, the backdrop of the play’s second half. This is all the actor is given to convey what kind of man the husband of the play’s tragic heroine really is. The first scene between him and Nora has to communicate their passion. The scene begins naturalistically, then, suddenly, the actor grabs a mike. Hang on, you think, what’s the microphone doing on stage? This might be modern dress, but no-one has a microphone sitting around in their living room. The actor leaps out of naturalism. He sings a vivacious, sexy love song. Everything about their relationship, their desire, comes to life. The audience aren’t looking at a character from a great play. They’re looking at a man showing off for the woman he loves. 

This play between naturalism and non-naturalism creates the space that Holmes uses to remind the audience: we’re all in this theatre together. This theatre in this city. Which is the city of the past and the city of the future and the city, crucially, of the now. The rupture takes the audience out of the bubble of history and lands them in the here-and-now. The play isn’t talking about long-lost figures. It’s talking about the audience’s contemporaries. Music, humour, and the courage to break the moment, help to release the power of a play which is describing things that happened a hundred years ago. It makes them happen now, upon the stage, in Dublin, all over again.

In the interval I step outside for some air. Young people walk past, talking and laughing. They look like they’ve stepped out of The Plough and the Stars. 

It’s only the first preview. The play isn’t “finished’ yet. There’s more work to be done. Only today, Sean and Jon decided to rip out most of the set’s backdrop, locating the scenes on a larger, emptier stage. There are discussions about the speed at which a tower falls, whether a pram would be better as a shopping trolley; how to stage the final scene. These discussions carry on in Doyle’s until gone 2 in the morning. Director, designer, associate director, all thrashing it out. The play is still coalescing. The various aspects of stagecraft - acting, sound, lights, design, language, music - are being honed and refined. I will never see the finished version. But I have already seen enough. To feel as though O’Casey’s complex vision of the seminal Irish revolution is alive and kicking, as relevant to the Abbey’s audience today as it was when it was first produced in this theatre, ninety years ago. Enough to see that the audience and the actors are, indeed, sharing a common space as they explore the play together.

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At the curtain call, the actor playing Jack brings on an Irish flag and drapes it over the scenery. He has not been asked to do this. Sean is not too sure what to make of it. Given the importance of symbols in the play, it's not a negligible action. It’s reminiscent of the way a footballer might drape himself in his nation’s flag after having won an international tournament with his European club. There’s a pride in origins at play, a pride which is reflected in a kind of benign nationalism, which reminds me of my other adopted home, Uruguay, where this kind of gesture might also occur. On the other hand, were it to happen on a British stage, the semiotics of an actor bringing on a Union Jack for the curtain call might be perceived to be less innocent. With the audience having left the theatre and the stage bare, someone observes: nice to see us celebrating the role of the Ivory Coast in the Easter Uprising. The actor has placed the flag the wrong way round. The Irish flag, placed the wrong way round, becomes the flag of the Ivory Coast. 

Thursday, 10.03.16