I have moved.

A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moved to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

I've uploaded all the criticism so far to new posts on Wordpress, so if you've found yourself here then you must be a really lucky person and very well done. Here's a picture of a squirrel for your troubles.

A Kettle of Fish

Wendy Kweh, design by Ingrid Hu, photo credit Helen Murray 

I really really liked this. And there have been some fairly sniffy reviews of this show that go something like “lot of tech going on, isn’t there? didn’t feelmuch did I?” All of which is fine, but I think doesn’t exactly get us anywhere to understanding what the show is doingor why I think it is actually really very impressive, despite (or maybe because of??) it’s faults. So, I’m going to think about it here.

It is a monologue: a woman telling a story about getting on a plane to do a business deal in an eastern-European country, and while on the plane, an air steward tells her that her flat back home is on fire. The text is slightly hazy about almost every detail of these events, as her character slowly dissociates. 

What I like about Brad Birch’s text is precisely the imagistic logic that seems slightly translucent, slightly untethered, but that has a texture you can really get lost in. The idea of someone flying to a country they know intimately through its statistics and while on the plane having a sort of breakdown in their identity feels like it is wallowing in the bedrock (an impossible metaphor) of our culturally anxieties. It reminded me quite a lot of The Fever –a text I love unassailably for its wit and its detail and its distortion.

There are some lost threads: I think it could have been probably fifteen longer, so that some of those really fascinating elements about foreignness, and techno-colonialism, and what we lose and how, could have been allowed to unspool a bit more. In its current state it feels a little like there are several sequences that feel like they are going somewhere and then don’t, and I wonder whether the play has been dramaturged a little too much towards coherence, which means losing some of the strange and difficult bits, but I imagine that lots of other people would feel differently about this and would want just a bit more character, which seems strange to me as I think by far the most interesting thing was how little of a window into character it was, much more focussed on an identity in a state of collapse, than one in a state of coherence. 

So, that’s the text: I think it’s basically great, with some slight problems that speak perhaps to trying to have feet in two camps (satisfying drama and experimental theatre: it seems to me that it’s a difficult one to manage in places like The Yard, which are slightly too big for studio-theatre, and slightly too interesting for the kind of plays broad audiences really go for, but I. di.gre’ss.)

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I’ve spoken about the text first because it seems to me that in the criticism thus far, people have minor problems there and then place them at the feet of a much more obvious point-of-attack, which is the design and its boldness. 

You have headphones on for almost the entire play, and the actress speaks directly into your ears, there is an immersive soundscape around you, but you are being whispered to intimately, right up close. There is a triptych of sets – a minimalist room in a flat; two seats on an aeroplane; and a gausy, white, nowhere space, onto which is projected a sort of video-installation. The designer Ingrid Hu works predominantly in gallery spaces, which I think shows through. 

It’s a design that invites youto come to it, not the other way around. Like Wendy Kweh’s performance, under Caitlin McLeod’s direction, it’s not going to scream the point at you. It doesn’t hold your hand or force you to feel but rather happens in some space near you and observes you in the act of listening. 

And I think it’s beautiful – probably the most beautiful design I’ve seen at The Yard, maybe the best design I’ve seen since Summer and Smoke– and very German: precise, fulsome, and an aesthetic object of its own (I was really captivated by the curtain at the back of the stage, which had those ironed folds you only find on plane-windows, and which seemed uncannily of-a-theatre and of-the-world). 

I think the attacks on the design are obvious and flawed and really frustrating, I think I’ve rarely seen a better piece of collaborative work, one where text and design work so seamlessly together to generate meaning. 

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700-words into this review, I realise I haven’t really said what it’s about, what it means. So… and, well… not sure.

Is it fair cop to continually just say that I think that’s a hallmark of good-ness? That anything good is necessarily not about anything else? Is that ok? I don’t know. But I read this thing this week about how writing a logical problem in a washed-out grey font makes it more likely you will solve the problem correctly, because cognitive strain mobilizes your rational mind ahead of your intuitive mind, which feels to me persuasive of the idea that theatre’s obfuscatory tactics, are actually generative ones for audiences.

So, I think it’s about that, maybe. It’s certainly made me think hard.  And I know I’d rather have a play too full of meaning that doesn’t manage to get through all of it, than one managing to comfortably explore nothing. And I’m going to go back again next week and do some more strained thinking and stare at some curtains.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.