Wind Bit Bitter, Bit Bit Bit Her

So. Well. Um. Right.

I really find a lot of work at Vaults doesn’t quite hit the mark. They market themselves as a sort of Edinburgh for London and people speak about them in vaguely laudatory ways on Twitter, but I’ve seen loads of brilliant, formally-expressive shows in Edinburgh that wouldn’t get made or seen or loved anywhere else, and I’ve seen, well, quite a few piles of unutterable shit at Vaults. Which is crude and unfair, I get that, but also, they made me sit through a much-lauded show about cycling last year which was both crap and, I’ll say it again, about cycling, so I feel a little fair game on the front of being an unutterable cunt.

It was therefore with trepidation* that I went to see WBBBBBBBbbbbBBbBbBhH and, well, so, well, um, right.

I’m going to go hard on the positives: I think the play, as evinced by having been nominated for the Soho’ Tony Craze Award [the Oscars of something, no doubt] is good and ambitious and more complex than it might at first appear. It’s a monologue of sorts about a bereaved mother called Mary who finds a disembodied arm on a beach and goes on a sort of conspiracy treasure hunt out of reality. It’s a really compelling narrative, and the world-building aspects of the text are deftly handled. The images build up and unravel at such a pace that the desired effect – I presume desired – of a woman clutching to anything that allows her to believe her child still alive – no matter its obvious unreality – is, well, effected.

That’s the good: I liked the story, I liked the way it was entextualised and the clear capacity for more than just plot that Sami Ibrahim’s writing offered.

However, I really had to dig deep for that praise and think about the text – whatever that means – beyond the performance in order to find it. Which isn’t really my thing but, well, whatever I don’t want to be mean. The whole thing is staged very strangely. There’s a stool and – for reasons that become so blisteringly, painfully apparent that you just wonder why they didn’t light the bloody thing in neon – a fridge. It’s staged in traverse, in a big ol’ room and it’s a big ol’ challenge to fill it, that doesn’t quite get met. The lighting is overused is probably a generous way of putting it (ill-thought-through, distracting and ugly is probably accurate).

The acting is fine. It’s all performed at precisely the paces you would expect – which is a stupid critique that undermines itself [*of course it fucking is*] – but what I mean is that the play works at the pace of the script, so when the text is a bit sad it goes slowly and when the text is a bit anxious it goes quickly, therefore the shocks at the plot and form level get evened out by a fairly expectation-answering performance style. (I think there’s also a problem when you have a second performer *spoiler* enter the playing space and perform for all of five minutes, meaning that coup de theatre disappears and you wonder whether it was just a mistake – not to mention it just being a bit rude to employ an actor only to shove them back offstage after five minutes but whatever, not my pervue).

There are some nice effects: I basically always like extended voice recordings onstage, though I’m not quite sure if or why this one worked; it’s nice, I suppose, to see a play in which two female characters can be in love without it being in any way a plot point – though this finds its corollary in the fact that anxious, mad mothers are hardly an underexamined locus of theatrical exploration.

Basically, I liked the play and can imagine a production that clears some of these things and I really hope that happens and it wasn’t the disappointment that the Vaults promised it might be but I just wish I’d been able to be more glowing about it.

*”With trepidation” ffs – it’s like I’m writing a review on Amazon for toothbrush heads. I’m rusty GET OVER IT.

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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.

People, Places and Please Don't @ me

What the hell is the point of this one?

People, Places and Things is, I think fairly objectively, a not very good play.

Now: if you feel like this is going to wreck something you love, stop reading. If you feel like you just don’t want to get angry at an averring opinion, stop reading. Honestly, for the love of God, I do not want to hear about people saying how wrong I am – there are literally awards ceremonies on Youtube dedicated to telling me this opinion isn’t right – but I’m going to explain myself because everyone’s got an albatross, or something and Haydon said he was interested and if Haydon tells you he’s interested then you sure as hell don’t disappoint him.

Here’s why.

That play is not about addiction. It isn’t. They can tell me till the cows come home about how people in recovery came to see the show and felt it told their story, my main revelation coming out of that show was literally zero about addiction but a lot about how interesting actors are and how interesting acting is and how theatre is just really bloody interesting.

It is. But that’s also not a difficult thing to explore when you are literally sat in a theatre making a bit of theatre.

The writing of this production finds the least difficult routes from A to B. Think about the process. The play starts and ends metatheatrically. The play’s central character is an actor struggling with being an actor who keeps acting. These are choices the play makes. There are so few representations of addiction in theatre and so few that are in any way sensitive and so few that are about women, that to choose this story is an act of having cake + eating. It says it is about one issue – an important one deserving scrutiny – but its actual concerns are about as close to home as possible. And any problems can always be explained away by the constructedness of it all, so anything goes.

The middle of the play is the most obvious, staid solution to a big problem. She goes into recovery and then what do they do? They wheel out a bunch of people and have a bunch of sodding group sessions. Group therapy? Onstage? I reckon that if you gave a bunch of GCSE students the opportunity to find a form to write about addiction that is exactly what they would have come up with. You get the corporate drug guy, then you get a bunch of people and you get to see the exact motivations for why they are there, but with some really good jokes, obviously.

You see them one by one, in a little line through the middle of the play and they mark time until we can get back to the really interesting character and how good she is at acting and how that says really interesting things about her personality and addiction (but addiction-lite shown to us mainly through a bunch of other actresses with wigs on popping out of every nook and cranny and then leaving in the least psychologically coherent image of what a mind in recovery might look like – on a side-note, the metatheatricality of this show really just makes you think in this moment that fucking hell there are a lot of actresses being given very very little to do and being employed by this production).

Getting specific about the text that everyone seems to find no fault with, there’s a trick contemporary playwrights use – and I think most people who write know this and conceive of it as pretty crap writing – where someone says “I heard someone say... “ or “I read once that…” and then the writer uses that to give themselves licence to write pretty clever esprit d’escalier lines, without having to explain why this character is talking like that.

Oh, here’s an example taken at random:

I heard this expression in a meeting. I was a scream in search of a mouth. I don’t know what it means exactly but that’s me, before. A scream in search of a mouth. In prison they get you to make your bed every day. Like here. Anyway. I made my bed this morning. Without having to remember to do it. I just got up and did it. I never used to do that.

This is paint-by-numbers addiction written by someone very well-read finding it hard to write less clever people. The play actually includes the line – admittedly later undercut but still – “Have you read Foucault?”

Look out. Niles Crane’s just popped by for a cameo appearance.

A personal hatred of mine, expressed so clearly by this show, is easy targets. This play has them in buckets but a particular one that stuck with me was Christianity. I’m not a Christian. I am an avowed atheist. But there is a moment just after the interval where you could practically hear the plinky plonky piano music as a silly Christian being silly with their silly faith that they’ve found as a comfort but that isn’t real gets walked out for some light relief. It really pissed me off. For weeks I thought how uncomfortable I felt sitting amongst a roomful of liberal theatre-goers laughing at someone finding solace in their religion. It was properly nasty theatremaking. Because whatever you think of how weird organised religion is, loads of vulnerable people find it really comforting and that’s really not a joke.

So, there’s a list of reasons – those are, I promise – just the main ones.

On positives and the reason it won all those plaudits and made everyone involved very happy and rich: Denise Gough is a really good performer so she fixed a lot of the play and Bunny Christie is a really good designer so she fixed the rest of it, I’m sure Jeremy had some part in that but I don’t know where and Duncan gets the jokes and I’m sure a nice house, which is nice, because Duncan is nice and Every Brilliant Thing and Lungs and even bits of 2071 are gamechangingly good. But PPP? Nope.

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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.