Fringe Planet

Good news comes along too rarely to let it go without comment, so here’s a bit.

Last 31 December, President Barack Obama signed a piece of legislation to warm Home Secretary Orbison‘s heart — and even that of the real-life Dick Cheney. Among the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was a Section 1021, titled “Affirmation of authority of the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Section 1021(b)(2) defines any individual detainable under the act, whether a U.S. citizen or not, as:

A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

It’s that “substantial” or “direct support” that’s the tricky part. As written, it could include any individual criticism — in thought, word, or deed — of the policies of the government in conducting counterterrrorism procedures, whether that individual was a member of the offending groups or not.

Paranoia? Au contraire, said U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in a 68-page opinion issued last Wednesday. Ruling in the case of Hedges et al. v. Obama, the Hon. Katherine Forrest issued a preliminary injunction that Section 1021 was unconstitutional. As she wrote, “At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021. Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.” There’s more in this Washington Post story.

President Obama signed this into law on 31 December and slipped it under the door of the new year, of course, when journalists along with everyone else were tanking up for the annual New Year’s Eve Running of the Drunken Idiots, and consequently it received little notice. Quite the opposite occurred when Obama expressed his support for the recognition of same-sex marriage a few weeks ago; you heard about nothing else for days, and my Facebook feed exploded with a roar of Obama-worship truly monumental to behold. Never mind that, as a states-rights issue, there’s very little Obama can actually do about it; never mind, too, that he came out in support of a cause which, according to a recent Gallup poll, the majority of Americans now support.

In American politics, especially in an election year, this is known as courage.

Of course, “I support same-sex marriage” might well mean the same thing as “Why not?” or “I don’t particularly care.” I admit there’s an important difference between “I approve” and “I don’t disapprove.” But this is about as benign as democracy gets, though David Cameron, the Conservative party Prime Minister of the UK, is probably sorry that his own nation doesn’t have the same Constitutional states-rights provision.

We should be thankful that there are still some fairly courageous people about. Among them is Chris Hedges, whose name appears first on the case citation concerning the NDAA. As he writes in this essay for Truthdig on 18 May, he and his fellow plaintiffs brought suit against the Obama administration with little real hope of success — “None of us thought we would win,” he says. “We had none of the resources of the government. [Plaintiffs' attorneys] worked for weeks on the case without compensation. All of us paid for our own expenses. And few people, including constitutional lawyers … , thought we had a chance. But we pushed forward. We pushed forward because all effort to impede the corporate state, however quixotic, is essential. Even if we ultimately fail we will be able to say we tried.”

Let’s be clear: As President, Barack Obama can’t do anything about same-sex marriage, but as Commander-in-Chief he can do something about national security — and he signed the NDAA, Section 1021 included. Obama signed into law the mechanics which could conceivably be used to institute a military-led police state here in the U.S., and he did it (speaking of courage) when nobody was around to see it. One may believe that Obama did so without any intention of ever putting those mechanics into motion. But Obama will be gone from the White House, either this January or four years from now, and the act he signed into law might well have fallen into the hands of a more conservative Republican government. Which, yes, could conceivably be worse.

The preliminary injunction issued in Hedges et al. v. Obama is not the final word on Section 1021, as Hedges points out. “The government has 60 days to appeal. It can also … accept the injunction that nullifies the law. If the government appeals, the case will go to a federal appellate court. The ruling, even if an appellate court upholds it, could be vanquished in the Supreme Court, especially given the composition of that court.” So, for Section 1021, this is only one step on a much longer road.

I don’t want to indulge in a bout of Hedges-worship either. He is frequently humorless, a fatal flaw in anyone who doesn’t himself want to be regarded as a messiah, and if there’s anything more politically ineffectual and quixotic than the Occupy movement, which he steadfastly supports with a baffling blindness to its very evident weaknesses, I can’t think of it. But credit where it’s due — good news, as I said.

In the end, Hedges et al. may fail in their quest to have this offending portion of the NDAA permanently struck down. If so, kudos to all those same-sex married couples for finally gaining the blessing of the Chief Executive. But they’d better shut up about any quibbles they have with the War on Terror if they don’t want to be locked away, without trial, for a long long time. Thanks to Hedges, they don’t have to worry about that — for now.

Peanuts cartoon with the last panel missing. Bleak. Bleak and wonderful.

Do you have a white whale? An elusive beast that rises to the surface ever so briefly, exposing its sleek, oily head to taunt you? I have such a whale, my friends. And it is scheduled to reach the surface again on Tuesday, 5/22 at 9pm. I'll need your help to catch it.  The play is called The Majestic Players Storm Kansas City. It's a blend of Noises Off and Dog Day Afternoon. It's about

The only thing disappointing about an evening of theatre like last night’s Hoodies Up! is that it only happens once and then it’s gone forever. I suppose that’s part of what makes it special. I certainly felt blessed to watch some truly gift actors bring back to life a cherished chapter from my days working in D.C.  Witnessing such miracles is one of the unique perks of being playwright that helps explain my continuing gluttony for its punishments.

Because it is unlikely that my contribution to last night’s offerings will ever be staged again, I offer the script here to anyone who missed it and might want to check it out in script form.

White Boy Can Take a Punch
by Paul Mullin
for HOODIES UP!: An Evening of Protest Plays Inspired by Trayvon Martin

      (The ensemble for this piece consists of three or four African American men and one young man of obvious European descent to play “WHITE BOY”.  Whenever a line is headed with “PLAYWRIGHT” anyone in the ensemble may speak it, director’s choice.)      

PLAYWRIGHT:  The playwright owes you a protest play.

PLAYWRIGHT:  And the playwright owes you someone in a hoodie.

PLAYWRIGHT:  The playwright isn’t sure what to protest

PLAYWRIGHT:  Even though all these hearts are broken.

PLAYWRIGHT:  So we’ll start with the hoodie.

PLAYWRIGHT:  1987.  Washington, D.C.  The National Archives.

PLAYWRIGHT:  A white boy, college age, sits hunched in the break room, his hoodie pulled up so he can sleep

PLAYWRIGHT:  Or at least faking being asleep. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  He’s the only white person in the room. 

WHITE BOY:  He is not the playwright.

      (An older African American actor becomes Roy, the supervisor.  He shepherds Paul or “WHITE BOY” into the break room.)

ROY:  Allright y’all.  Get off your lazy asses.  I got a new worker for the crew.  His name is.  What’s your name now?

WHITE BOY:  Paul Mullin.

ROY:  Name’s Paul. This here’s Virgil, that’s Prescott and over there in the corner’s ... uh... Brian.

WHITE BOY:  Hey.

ROY:  I want y’all show him the ropes and such.  I don’t want none of your shuckin’ n’ jivin’.  We got a pallet that’s to go pronto from stack C-17 to uh... well, I’ll find out where it’s got to go you just get your asses up there and get it ready to move.  All right?

VIRGIL:  He summer help?

ROY:  Yeah, he summer help, but I just might take him on permanent I like the cut his jib.  So get your damn asses up to... what was it now?

PRESCOTT:  C-17.

ROY:  Yeah.  And take Paul with you, hear?

PRESCOTT:  Yeah.

ROY:  All right.  I’m a leave you to it then, gentlemen.  No bullshit please.  And take Paul with you.

      (Roy leaves.)

VIRGIL:  Where he say the pallet at?

PRESCOTT:  C-17.

VIRGIL:  A’ight.  Let’s hit it.

      (Brian doesn’t move.  Virgil and James get up and put on their navy blue “laborer” dust coats.)

WHITE BOY:  Where do I get one of those coats?

VIRGIL:  One of these?  You gotta earn one of these, Summer Help.

WHITE BOY:  Okay.  So we’re heading to stack C-17?

VIRGIL:  Yeah.  We heading there.  You can just relax your ass.

PRESCOTT:  We got this one.

WHITE BOY:  But didn’t Roy say--

VIRGIL:  Check it.  He thinks Roy run the show.

PRESCOTT:  Just the same we better take ‘em. 

VIRGIL:  A’ight, Summer help.  You wanna work, we’ll work you.

      (They leave the break room.  Head down a corridor.  Push a button.  Wait for an elevator.)

PRESCOTT (to White Boy):  Push “up.”

WHITE BOY (pushing it):  What’s with that guy Brian?

VIRGIL:  Who Brian?

PRESCOTT:  He mean “Flash.”... Flash... uh... don’t care to come out on jobs.

WHITE BOY:  So he just sleeps in the breakroom all day?

VIRGIL:  Yeah, he don’t like to move too quick. 

PRESCOTT:  Which is how come he called “Flash.” 

VIRGIL:  He summer help.  Just like you.  Won’t be around come the fall.  Be back at college.

WHITE BOY:  I don’t go to college.

VIRGIL:  Why?  You stupid?

WHITE BOY:  I wanna work.

VIRGIL:  Hear that?  Summer Help wanna work.

PRESCOTT:  Yeah.

VIRGIL:  Elevator door opens.  They step inside.

WHITE BOY:  The elevator doors close.  And that’s when it happened. 
      And I probably shouldn’t say it like that.  “That’s when it happened.”  Because it makes it sound more dramatic than it actually was.  That’s when something happened.  Something that would change the duration of my working at the National Archives, and maybe me for the rest of my life. 

VIRGIL:  Yo, Mister Future Playwright Man.

WHITE BOY:  Yeah?

VIRGIL:  Why don’t we just show ‘em what happened?

WHITE BOY:  Yeah, Okay. 
      The elevator door closes and instead of pushing a button for a floor, Prescott and Virgil start to swing arms on me.      
      (They do this.)

VIRGIL:  Throwing some punches on the new blood.

WHITE BOY:  Some nice hard shots to my body, my arms.

PLAYWRIGHT:  And I knew I had a decision to make.       
      (Then go to slow motion.)

PLAYWRIGHT:  I flashed on Flash, the white college kid sitting in the break room acting like he was asleep. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  And I knew what had happened to  him.  They had taken him for an elevator ride and he hadn’t reacted right. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  And now they left him abandoned, untrusted, alone.

PLAYWRIGHT:  And I ran the numbers of the situation quickly in my head. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  I’m in an elevator in the National Archives. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  Even in the late 80’s you still had to run a gauntlet of federal security to even get this deep into the building. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  These boys ain’t gonna to kill me. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  And if they ain’t kill me, they ain’t gonna beat me too bad either.  This was their full-time gig after all.  I was just summer help.  I was gonna take some punches and depending how I responded I was either going to be working on their crew or I was gonna be faking sleep in the break room.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Now the one thing these boys didn’t know about me was I had a brother.  Two years older, and he and his best friend, our next door neighbor, tortured me about as bad as they could think of. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  Beating on me endlessly.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Sticking lit firecrackers in my mouth and then snatching them away at the last minute

PLAYWRIGHT:  Pig-tying me and hanging me from the basement rafters.

PLAYWRIGHT:  You name it. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  I knew a little something about answering some roughness.

PLAYWRIGHT:  All of this took a few seconds.  I made a decision.  I took a chance. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  I went for the big one, Prescott first.

      (Paul punches Prescott hard in the arm.)

PRESCOTT:  Ho!

PLAYWRIGHT:  Always go for the big one first.  They’ll have less to prove when they hit back.

       (Prescott punches back.  Paul takes it and throws one on Virgil.)

VIRGIL:  Damn!

PRESCOTT:  Check out, White Boy!

      (Virgil punches back.  And then the three boys/men begin a laughing/punching/dodging dance with each other.  Then they suddenly stop as all three simultaneously say:)

VIRGIL/PRESCOTT/WHITE BOY:  The elevator doors open.

      (Roy stands there suspicious.)

ROY:  All right.  What all y’all asses up to?

VIRGIL:  Nothing, Roy.  We just going to... where is we s’posed to me going?

ROY:  You asking me?

WHITE BOY:  Stack C-17.

PRESCOTT:  Yeah, C-17.

ROY:  Well, then get your dumb asses up there. 

VIRGIL:  Okay.  Let the door go, Roy.  And we will.  Shit.

ROY:  And summer help, don’t be joining none of these asses’ foolishness, now, you hear?

WHITE BOY:  Yes, sir.

VIRGIL/PRESCOTT/WHITE BOY:  The elevators doors closed.      
      (The boys burst into hysterics.)     
PLAYWRIGHT:  We worked hard—

PLAYWRIGHT:  Like only young men are stupid enough to work.

PLAYWRIGHT:  And we played hard—

PLAYWRIGHT:  Like only young men are stupid enough to play.

WHITE BOY:  They told me their myths.

PRESCOTT:  White boys ain’t got no style.

WHITE BOY:  Myth.

VIRGIL:  Shit.  Look at them nasty assed sneaks you got on. Shit boy, look like a damn base head.

PRESCOTT:  White boys eat pussy.

WHITE BOY:  True.

PRESCOTT:  Aw shit!

VIRGIL:  He sit right there and admit it.

WHITE BOY:  What?  Don’t you?

VIRGIL:  Shit, boy.  You crazy?

WHITE BOY:  You’re missing out, Shortie.

VIRGIL:  Fuck.

PRESCOTT:  White boy can take a punch.

WHITE BOY:  What?

PRESCOTT:  Sure.  Can’t fight for shit but white boy can take a punch.  Like that dude Jerry Cooney Michael Spinks fought.

WHITE BOY:  Oh.

VIRGIL:  Yeah, but Spinks knocked his fat white ass out though.

PRESCOTT:  True.

WHITE BOY:  My crowning glory came one morning when Slim came into the break room.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Slim drove the truck and was the hero of the crew.

     (Slim can be played by the same actor playing Roy, but Slim is hard, all business.)

SLIM:  All right.  I’m going to the dump.  Who comin’?

VIRGIL:  Me.

PRESCOTT:  Naw.  Shit.  It’s my turn.

VIRGIL:  The fuck it is.

PRESCOTT:  We can both go.

SLIM:  Fuck that.  Only want one.  You know what?  White Boy.

VIRGIL & PRESCOTT (appalled):  What?

VIRGIL:  White Boy summer help.  He don’t get to go to no dump.

SLIM:  He coming to the dump with me.

WHITE BOY:  And so I got to ride with Slim.

      (The climb in the truck and ride.)

SLIM:  First we gonna take a little detour.

WHITE BOY:  Oh, okay.

SLIM:  You ever been to Southeast.

WHITE BOY:  Uh... no.

SLIM:  I bet you ain’t.  That’s White folks worst fear, riding through Southeast.  Right?

WHITE BOY:  I uh... I dunno.  I guess.

SLIM:  Well, here it be.  Look around.  There’s my mamma’s church.  That’s the store we buy milk and eggs.  That court’s where I played hoops before I fucked up my knees.  Look dangerous don’t it?

WHITE BOY:  No.

SLIM:  Fuck no.  It’s people, white boy.  Southeast is people.  Black folks livin’. 

WHITE BOY:  Yeah.

SLIM:  So you tell that to the next person talking shit on the Southeast and Harlem and West Baltimore and Newark and anywhere.  You hear?

WHITE BOY:  Yeah.

SLIM:  Yeah.  You ain’t gonna though.

WHITE BOY:  You never know, Slim.  I might. 

SLIM:  All right, White Boy.  All right.  Now we head to the dump.  Deep breaths through your mouth as we ride in.  The bumps and stink can make you sick, you forget to breath.

WHITE BOY:  Okay.  Got it.

SLIM:  Good.  Shit.  White boy got it.

PLAYWRIGHT:  The playwright got a job permanent with the archives crew but had to leave in November when he got cast as Young Scrooge in a production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL at Ford’s Theater.

PLAYWRIGHT:  He only saw anyone again from his archive days once.

PLAYWRIGHT:  It was a blizzard.  No busses running.  So I was hitchhiking my way home from the Rhode Island Ave. Metro Station.

PLAYWRIGHT:  A truck drove by and there was Virgil sitting in the back of it.

VIRGIL (hollering from far):  Yo!  Paul!

WHITE BOY:  Yo Virgil!

VIRGIL:  You need a ride, yo?

WHITE BOY:  Hell, yeah.

VIRGIL:  Well then hop in, fool.

     (Paul hops in the back of the truck, shakes hands with Virgil and they start shooting the shit.)

PLAYWRIGHT:  The playwright realizes now what he’d like to protest.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Fear.

PLAYWRIGHT:  The fear that kept Flash in the breakroom.  The fear that made George Zimmerman figure that the best way to greet the world is with a gun shoved in his waistband.

PLAYWRIGHT:  It’s true.

PLAYWRIGHT:  You’re right. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  Your worst fear is true. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  The world will kill you one day. 

PLAYWRIGHT:  But until that day...

PLAYWRIGHT:  You simply have to bring it as much love and fascination as it brings you.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Everyone you see is you.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Throw your gun away.

PLAYWRIGHT:  White boy can take a punch.

PLAYWRIGHT:  And white boy can throw one.

VIRGIL:  Sorta.

PLAYWRIGHT:  But you ain’t need no gun.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Throw your gun away.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Ain’t no skin color can keep out a bullet.

PLAYWRIGHT:  Throw it away.

ROY:  Now all y’all asses get back to work.  I won’t stand no more of this shuckin’ ‘n jivin’ now.  You hear me?

      (End of play.)

 

© Paul Mullin 2012

Nobody in the last fifty years has gone to live theatre to kill time like they would slip into a cineplex.  Nobody has sat and blankly watched theatre like they would TV because they don’t have anything better to do. There is always something better to do.  People go to the theatre because they hope—more often than not against their better judgment—that what they will experience there will change them, open them up, break down some poisoned part of them, help them live with some unbearable pain, give them more hope.  People who go to the theatre are frequently disappointed.

Tyrone Brown asked me to share with my colleague Sharon Williams the honor of giving the curtain speech at tonight’s sole performance of Hoodies Up!, a series of short plays inspired  by the Trayvon Martin tragedy.  Tyrone surely intends for us to keep our remarks exquisitely brief and practical tonight, but as I started thinking about it my brain, as it is sometimes wont to do, erupted in about five different directions.  These moments of mind spasm are, in part, why I created Just Wrought: that is, to spare everyone me blathering on at curtain speeches and the like.  Here’s what I won’t be saying tonight:

My reason for joining the Hoodies Up! writers team can be boiled down into one word: selfishness. I wanted to work with Tyrone Brown, a director whom most folks in the “Seattle theatre know” recognize as a coming powerhouse. I wanted to write for African American actors, a chance as rare as hen’s teeth in the Pacific Northwest and, sadly, in the nation at large. I wanted to tell a story I had never publically told before, from a time in my life that I cherish. All good selfish reasons. (When I start doing theatre for non-selfish reasons let’s all start worrying, okay?)

Hermann Göring famously declared, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Nazism at its nastiest, and most honest.  Fascists hate art and anything else they don’t understand, or that causes people to prick their ears up and say, “Whoa!  What’s going on?”  Of course, there’s a simple syllogistic trick that flips fat-headed Göring on his ear: “When I hear the world ‘gun’ I reach for my culture.”  That’s what Tyrone did when he began processing the Trayvon tragedy, and that’s what the writers he invited did in turn, and then in turn the actors and directors.  Tonight it’s your turn: the audience, the final hopeful piece of this hope-against-reason puzzle. Tonight, when you come watch Hoodies Up! you’ll be reaching for your culture, and countering the insidious icon of the gun that holds America mesmerized.  You will be taking the risk of being bored, confused, annoyed and generally disappointed, but you will have chosen hope over every empty and utterly logical reason why you shouldn’t have bothered.

Because theatre requires hope beyond logic. 

Just like living.

When Is A Clock (2008)

The Most Wonderful Love (2006)

Confess Your Bubble (2012)

Glee Club (2010)

The Great Escape (2003)

Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast (2011)

The Americans (2004)

I wanted to take a second send a shoutout to Bruce Goldstone, the brilliant artist that created all the art you see above - including the fantastic art for Confess Your Bubble. These are the images that Bruce created for postcard and poster art for my work. For me, it's a great thrill whenever I see what he's created. He encapsulates the plays, plays with the themes, makes them seem compelling and fun. You can see a whole lot of his work on other shows here, as well.

Thanks Bruce!

George sends some good thoughts to Confess Your Bubble. Much appreciated.

This morning brings news of the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who would have been 87 in just ten days. Terry Teachout has this; the Guardian has an obituary here; the New York Times runs a much more extensive obituary by Daniel Lewis here. Below, a YouTube video of the great lieder master singing Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig. His accompanist is Gerald Moore.

<object height="402" width="549"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5XP5RP6OEJI?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0"/><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="402" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5XP5RP6OEJI?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="549"></embed></object>

Drop everything for Three Kingdoms at the Lyric Hammersmith in London and get Smashed with Gandini Juggling in Brighton

Scotland

ATC's double bill of Sarah Kane's Crave and Ivan Viripaev's Illusions is not an easy evening's viewing – but it is a rewarding one at the Traverse in Edinburgh. Also at the Traverse is One Day in Spring, dramatic snapshots from the Arab uprisings. Abi Morgan's 27 is at the Citizens in Glasgow. And the Pitlochry Theatre Festival kicks off with Little Shop of Horrors and the 39 Steps.

North

New things to catch this week include the transfer of Fiona Evans' Geordie Sinatra, first seen at Live in Newcastle, and now breezing into the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough. Lady Windermere's Fan is revived at the Royal Exchange in Manchester; Greg Hersov directs. Of rather more interest is Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm in the studio from Wednesday. Tonight and tomorrow you can see it too at Hull Truck. The Lowry plays host to Opera North's really terrific Carousel from Wednesday. Amy Lamé is celebrating an Unhappy Birthday at Contact in Manchester tonight and tomorrow night; it's wafer-thin but fun. And it's one night only – tomorrow – for Theatre Ad Infinitum' s moving and wordless tale of loss, Translunar Paradise, at the Duke's in Lancaster.

Shared Experience's Mary Shelley heads to Northern Stage in Newcastle, but the really great show here next week is for the under-fives: Catherine Wheels's wonderful White, set in a dazzling world where colours start to appear. At the Square Chapel in Halifax The Ugly Spirit is a backstage tale of twins and never being alone from Fittings Multimedia Arts. Flying Cloud's Napoli tells how decisions made in 1944 impinge upon today and is part of the new writing season at West Yorkshire Playhouse. If you want a glimpse of the future, head to the York Theatre Royal where the annual Take Over Festival hands over the theatre to the under-26s. The big show this week is Evan Pacey's Scarberia, a new play that links Scarborough in Yorkshire with Scarborough in Toronto through a disappearance and a discovery. Head to Sheffield and the Crucible for John Simm in Pinter's Betrayal and for the latest from Kaite O'Reilly. Also in Sheffield, LeanerFasterStronger considers sport and how far people will go to be the best.

Central and East

Lots to get excited about here. Oily Cart are tackling Shakespeare for kids aged two to four with In a Pickle, which is at the Swan in Stratford upon Avon and is inspired by The Winter's Tale. This month's Performance in the Pub at the Crumblin' Cookie in Leicester on Thursday feature's Third Angel's brilliant The Lad Lit Project and Jodean Sumner's wordplay piece It Starts Like This.

Lakeside Arts in Nottingham plays host next Thursday to the lively Zimbawean Two Gentlemen of Verona, recently seen at the Globe in London. Warwick Arts Centre has Hannah Ringham's playful Hannah Ringham's Free Show (bring money); it's well worth a look. It's a last chance tomorrow at the Curve for the Emma Rice-directed British Bollywood musical Wah! Wah! Girls, which is then London-bound. Mikron stop off in Beeston, Nottingham and then head to Loughborough with Can You Keep a Secret, about the rise and fall of the Yorkshire luddites. Details here. Lorca's Blood Wedding joins The Bacchae in the Festival of Chaos at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton.

Look East and it's all about the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and at the end of the week the Pulse Festival in Ipswich. British Social Athlete looks intriguing at the Dovercourt swimming pool in Harwich on Sunday as part of Lace.

Wales

I haven't seen it, but the reports are pretty ecstatic about Nikolai Foster's Sondheim revival Merrily We Roll Along at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold. Cardiff city centre becomes the backdrop for the 1970s Parisian spy thriller My Life in the CIA, from rising new company Give It a Name. Details here. New writing at the Sherman with The Get Together, a story of betrayal. It's your last chance for Frantic Assembly's Little Dogs at the Patti Pavilion, and Swallows and Amazons sails into the sunset from the New in Cardiff.

South

Masses of good stuff in Mayfest in Bristol, which really buzzes at the Tobacco Factory, Bristol Old Vic and other venues all over the city. Of particular interest is Belarus Free Theatre's Minsk 2011: a Reply to Kathy Acker at the Tobacco Factory and Kieran Hurley's Hitch and Gary McNair's Crunch in the Brewery. Also take a look at Jo Bannon's Exposure at the Arnolfini. But the lineup is fab for the whole festival. Be adventurous and plunge in.

Down in Plymouth, there's time to catch Propeller's Henry V and the Winter's Tale this weekend or book in for Stan's Café's The Cardinals from Tuesday. There's a new Michael Wynne comedy, Canvas, at the Minerva in Chichester, and Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room is a hit for the Ustinov in Bath. Things remain lively in Brighton, where both the official festival and the fringe continue. I'd particularly recommend the Gandini's Smashed, a brilliant juggling show at the Theatre Royal as part of the main festival.

London

It's not often I say drop everything, but I do recommend just that for Simon Stephens and Sebastian Nübling's Three Kingdoms at the Lyric Hammersmith. Is it the future of British theatre? Probably not. Is it part of the future? Undoubtedly. Its influence will seep into the cracks. You come out a different shape from when you went in. I can also thoroughly recommend the final performances of Hitch and Crunch at CPT, which offers another take on globalization and capitalism and offers particularly interesting viewing alongside Three Kingdoms. For total strangeness see Ray Lee's Ethometric Museum at BAC. I haven't seen Tom Marshman's Legs 11, but it sounds fun.

There's lots of Shakespeare around, including Deafinitely Theatre's British Sign Language version of the pun-filled Love's Labour's Lost in the Globe to Globe festival, and the circus-inspired Two Roses for Richard at the Roundhouse. Theatre Delicatessen's Henry V at a pop-up space in Marylebone looks interesting.

The big openings this week are Posh at the Duke of York's, Chariots of Fire at Hampstead Theatre and Peter Brook's The Suit at the Young Vic. Cartoon de Salvo's latest, The Irish Giant, begins at Southwark Playhouse where I'm also going to see The Hairy Ape. Check out the Weekend events at Wilton's Music Hall, which include work from Duckie; it kicks off next Friday. There's a new Steven Berkoff at the Charing Cross Theatre, the Pirandello-inspired Six Actors in Search of a Director. And Polly Findlay's revival of Antigone with the marvellous Jodie Whittaker begins previewing at the NT.

As ever, share what you think about the shows you are seeing and have a lovely weekend. And don't forget to get involved in our threads and tweet your reviews with the hashtag #GdnReview – we've started plucking out the best.

If you can manage it, you should take the hike out to Brooklyn’s Brick next month for Matthew Freeman‘s new show, Confess Your Bubble, a monologue written for the Brick’s summer Democracy festival. Directed by Matt’s long-time collaborator Kyle Ancowitz, the play promises to be among Matt’s more prankish but still incisive recent plays:

Due to a plea bargain, Senator Carl Corpuscle, a Democratic Senator from the Great State of Washington (not D.C.), is delivering a speech about his life and views on the government to students at a local high school. Attendance is not mandatory, and only students over 17 may attend. Senator Corpuscle talks about his role in the Democratic Administration, delivers a civics lesson, and offers dire warnings — with slides to illustrate his points.

I still warmly remember Matt’s fine and haunting When Is a Clock from a few years ago, and given my memory, this is something. Confess Your Bubble runs 21-30 June; more information about this (and the other promising plays the Democracy festival will present) is here, and tickets are available here.

Confess Your Bubble comes with a disclaimer that it’s not suitable for children, even if its solo performer, who plays Senator Corpuscle, was once very suitable for children indeed. As any parent of preschool children will tell you, Steve Burns was for many years a great favorite of the toddler set as the host of Blue’s Clues; Billie and Goldie think he’s just great, and Marilyn and I think so too. Burns left Blue’s Clues ten years ago to pursue his acting and music career; in the below clip from the Moth’s storytelling series, Burns talks winningly about his career as a children’s show host, and the most peculiar, hilarious, and moving realizations to which it led. It’s not suitable for young audiences, either.

Again, you should catch him live in Matt’s show next month, and as long as you’re there enjoy the other offerings of the Democracy festival as well.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" height="402" width="549"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CwmtkFPYXsg?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="402" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CwmtkFPYXsg?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="549"></object>

Bloggers are smashing old orthodoxies this week, from ideas of what theatre should be to myths about race and acting

This may sound like I'm talking myself out of a job, but if you read one blog post this year, make sure it's Alex Chisholm's guest post for Exeunt magazine. Chisholm is the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Associate literary director. Her post is called The End of "New Writing"? That might sound a bit like she's talking herself out of a job as well. Far from it; she's talking herself into one, rather brilliantly.

Her essay brings together two strands of conversation that have been bubbling away for a little while. First, that the development culture that sprung out of the funding boom of the arts-friendly New Labour government has settled into a new form of orthodoxy. "The 'New Writing play," she writes, "like the 'Well Made Play' before it, exists as some sort of ideal to which new writers are supposed to aspire." Broadly speaking, the result is that, as a writer worms their way through the various developmental stages – drafts, workshops, staged readings and so on – the play is shaped to fit the mould. Then, having smoothed any edges by the time it reaches production, the play is staged with the straightest of bats so that "little is gained from the seeing the performance that you would not have got from reading the play."

Second, she attacks the false dichotomy between new writing and new work: "New Writing does narrative, story, characters and naturalism, whereas New Work does non-linear, non-narrative, non-naturalism." She argues that each field operates in its own slipstream and remains distinct and self-contained. The answer – and Chisholm notes that it's already coming into effect – is to start jumbling things and embrace the idea of a single, pluralistic theatrical culture that bucks the notion of what theatre should be and embraces the gamut of possibility. Hurrah for that.

On the subject of smashing orthodoxy, bloggers have been arguing against other unhelpful old familiars as well. Comedian Laura Lexx is fed up of the myth that – guess what's coming next – women aren't as funny as men. (The latest offending article that spawned Lexx's post is this one in the Telegraph.) "Barely a gig goes by," she writes, "where, if I'm getting praise from someone who happened to like me, they don't drag my gender into it." What follows is a firm slap down of the standard argument: "Life has taught me the women around me are just as funny as the men," she writes, simply. "Why should that change on a stage?"

Over at the Huffington Post, David McAlmont (yes, the singer) chases down a similar issue with regards to race. His piece stems from the Telegraph's recent interview with David Harewood, which suggested that black British actors need to go America for decent roles. McAlmont rightly argues that this over-simplifies. He talks about his friend, the actor Cyril Nri: "Because he is perceived as well-to-do/upper-middle, he has scored judge and police superintendent on television, where other actors can only expect gang members or token mate."

Nri's about to play Cassius in the RSC's production of Julius Caesar and raises the question as to how we talk about it. Should we, as has been the case so far, call it an 'all-black' production? Or should we think of it as one set in "Nigeria decades ago"? The former, says McAlmont, "denigrates the calibre of his fellow players," but the latter equally leaves room for white actors and looks equally like positive discrimination. Nri steps in: "It's not positive discrimination, just positive."

So when you are a playwright and you want someone to give you money, like perhaps a theater, or a foundation, or a wealthy friend, you are asked to submit an artist statement with your application. Sometimes this is a free-form situation. "Tell us why you want this." Sometimes this is a little more specific. "Tell us why you want this, and also how you are planning to change the face of theater

Have you seen Headstrong yet? People: you should see Headstrong. It's written by Patrick Link and directed by William Carden. It features the considerable talents of Ron Canada, Tim Cain, Alexander Gemignani, and Nedra McClyde. It is an exceptionally beautiful piece of theater, incredibly moving and smart and insightful. It is also true. Now, Patrick Link always writes true, the man never met

Check out this new feature from nytheatrenow, that highlights shows in the Democracy Festival. Including interviews with me and Steve Burns, about Confess Your Bubble.

First published on 7 April 2011.

From Ben Brantley’s “The Joys of Feel-Bad Drama,” in today’s New York Times:

Still, more than three decades after it was written, [Wallace Shawn's] Marie and Bruce …  continues to make many people recoil. And that’s because it is the opposite of a feel-good play. It’s a feel-bad play. That means it lacks the emotionally redemptive features of other works with similarly bleak worldviews: the catharsis of classical tragedy, or the outsized, blazing pessimism of Strindberg’s plays of marital warfare or the exquisite, compassionate lyricism of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams’s melancholy dramas. …

Similarly, we still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style. If you’re going to say something nasty, or flout taboos, say it with satire or poetry or larger-than-life passion. The Book of Mormon, this season’s hot-ticket Broadway show, makes fun not just of Mormonism but pretty much all religions, and it has a relentlessly foul mouth. But it is also a classic feel-good musical. Even the dark, violent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s new play about the war in Iraq, uses the artifice of comedy to keep us at a distance.

The last show at which I sensed the kind of unease I felt among the audience of Marie and Bruce was the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted several years ago. This British drama imagines an England in the grip of an internecine, nobody-wins civil war (inspired by accounts of the Balkan wars), and everybody in it behaves about as badly as people can. Unlike Marie and Bruce, Blasted is a shocker. It features acts of rape and mutilation. But it shares with Mr. Shawn’s play a hopeless view of humanity that goes way beyond cynicism. …

At a time in the theater when anything goes (to borrow the title of an old comfort-making musical now being revived on Broadway), making audiences squirm isn’t easy — and perhaps not even desirable. …

Brantley may be offering that last clause (emphasis added by myself, by the way) as a rhetorical gesture to spur further conversation. Or perhaps not; it is hard to tell whether Brantley is speaking for himself, or if he is speaking for what he considers to be the mindset of the audience (a mindset which, to grant him the benefit of a doubt, he may not himself share).

Classical tragedy, Strindberg and Williams are all found to be “emotionally redemptive” (whatever that may mean, whoever is to be redeemed, whether it’s the characters in the play, the dramatist or the audience), but Shawn and Kane apparently fall short of this laudable goal. In this, the conservative quality of contemporary theatre is to be found: the need for catharsis far outweighs any discomfort which might be created in the spectator, lest the spectator be expected to take that discomfort home with him. Regardless of the headline on the story, there seems to be very little joy in what Brantley characterizes as “feel-bad” theatre. The catharsis of classical tragedy was a social convention as well: the haste with which so many Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies seek to tie up any loose ends bespeaks a fear that the tragedy has unleashed ungovernable energies that can’t be tied together in Aristotelian closure: the ending, the catharsis, is imposed, not organic to the dynamics of the drama.

As Mr. Brantley says, “We still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style.” Indeed; it is expected to behave with propriety, to refrain from exploration beyond those formal and topical limitations; a theatre work must be a “classic feel-good musical” or adhere to the “artifice of comedy,” however much its energies may lead it astray from these apparent virtues.

I was speaking the other day to a friend who has seen more — and written more about — theatre over the past several decades than I possibly ever could hope (if that’s the word) to do; I wager she’s also got Brantley beat by quite a few miles as well. “I don’t go to the theatre for fun,” she told me. “If I want to have fun there are plenty of other things I can do that are far more fun than the theatre. I go for a walk or I watch TV or almost anything else.” The theatre should be a place that opens us to those “undesirable” recognitions that are denied to us by the television or film or music that must appeal to a far broader audience. Its intimacy makes it the pre-eminent arena for the searing investigations that the best theatre offers. But indeed, they do not close at the end, but should remain open: open for us to bring to our homes, to consider both our selves and our place in this world. And this, it must be said, is a talent at which Kane and Shawn excel.

I’ve written in the past on both Sarah Kane (here) and Wallace Shawn (here).

Can I confess?  I've never done this before.  Not just Bloodworks, but written on a blog before.  Except for that interview.  But that was different.  And Tony was there for that one.  And Patrick ended up posting it because I couldn't figure it out.  But this is just me.  I'm a little out of my depth.  Does this look right?  Is anyone reading this?  I'll try to keep this brief.   This year

Theatre critics everywhere have been slow to innovate, yet the digital world – from Pinterest to geotagging – offers ever-expanding possibilities

Discussions about the future of theatre criticism seem to be evergreen. It is a debate that continues to impassion bloggers, and one that arose again at the latest instalment of Devoted and Disgruntled back in February, in a session challenging the barrier traditionally erected between theatremakers and critics. One linked but relatively neglected aspect of the conversation, however, is how criticism might fully explore and exploit the growing possibilities allowed by digital developments.

When it comes to digital, I think we're all still fumbling around in the dark. In the world of theatre comment, this has manifested itself in recurring, sometimes ugly debates between mainstream critics and the blogging community. But what if the technology at our disposal offers more than occasion for conflict? While words alone can create a rich tapestry of critical response, imagine how much richer this might be with the addition of images, video, audio, geotagging, experimental forms such as Pinterest – the list goes on. Despite having such options at their fingertips, the majority of those writing theatre criticism for the web remain trapped in the conventional print review format: a block of text that often tries to avoid spoilers. Myriad possibilities are there, but it seems we're slow to adopt them.

This is not to dismiss all theatre writers as luddites. Some bloggers and critics are embracing the possibilities of digital criticism and experiments are beginning to take shape. Twitter, for instance, has opened up instant discussion, allowing theatregoers to share their thoughts from the moment they step out of the auditorium. Luke Murphy has taken the trend to another level by aggregating such reviews on one feed – an intriguing idea, but one arguably limited by the tweet's inherent brevity.

Matt Trueman, meanwhile, played with structure in his clickable review of Constellations earlier in the year, an experiment that had its flaws but asked fascinating questions about how the form of theatre criticism might reflect the form of the theatre being critiqued. A rich and ever-increasing variety of digital formats offer the opportunity to go even further. Might we begin to see purely visual responses to theatre through platforms such as Pinterest, or more video responses along the lines of blogger Eve Nicol's refreshingly enthusiastic YouTube reviews?

Beyond experimenting with form, and returning to the discussions initiated at Devoted and Disgruntled, the digital space even has the potential to set out a whole new model for how critics might engage with the theatre they write about. Theatre writers Jake Orr and Maddy Costa are beginning to do just this through the creation of Dialogue, an online playground where theatre makers, writers and spectators can open up new conversations. Thanks to the flexibility allowed by online criticism, where page space is not an issue and responses can go further than words, the role of the critic could in future go beyond reviewing to play a greater part in the space between theatre, creator and audience.

The possibilities raised by digital technology pose more questions than they answer, but these are questions that beg to be thrown open for wider debate. How might digital experimentation impact upon mainstream criticism? How can we play with form and structure to create the theatre criticism of the future? And, crucially, what implications does digital innovation have for the evolving role of the critic?

It’s always a pleasure to welcome the annual summer visits of the Potomac Theatre Project to New York. This year, the company will offer Neal Bell’s Monster, an adaptation of the Frankenstein story, and a timely production of Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, the first directed by Jim Petosa (recently named the new artistic director of Boston’s New Repertory Theatre) and the second by Cheryl Faraone. The plays will run in repertory July 3–29 at the PTP’s usual summer residence, the Atlantic Stage 2 at 330 West 16th Street; more information here, and tickets available here.

Risk/Reward turns 5 this year! Amazing. The festival has grown from a few wild nights in the Someday Lounge (on what I remember as the hottest weekend of the summer) to a beautiful few days in the beautiful Artists Repertory Theater.

In case you haven't seen it, the 2012 line-up is on our site here. This year we have SEVEN artist from THREE states and ONE Canadian province. That pretty much covers the west coast. Who knows, maybe next year we'll head inland and host someone from Idaho....

Also you can now browse line-ups from festivals past. Check them out: 2008 2009 2010 and 2011.

Sound the alarm: Bloodworks is back. Youngblood's end-of-the-season reading series will begin on Wednesday, May 16 and continue all the way through Monday, June 25. All of the readings are free and all will take place at Ensemble Studio Theatre (549 West 52nd Street, 2nd Floor). Bloodworks is an exciting time of year, an Advent calendar of awesome and your chance to get a look at what the

The mindblowing view from Cornwall's Minack and the intimacy of Bristol's Tobacco Factory make for some of my favourite haunts. Which are your perfect playhouses?

There's been an outbreak of critics writing about their favourite theatres. Michael Coveney's top 10 includes London's Wyndhams, the Theatre Royal in Brighton, and the King's in Edinburgh – the latter is truly beautiful, but was apparently designed for people with no knees. The Stage's Mark Shenton says his heart soars at a glimpse of the National in London, a building that many think resembles a concrete bunker, while in the comments thread the Stage's Alistair Smith makes the unlikely confession that he likes the capital's brutalist Barbican, a building designed not with humans but with moles in mind. Nonetheless, I have to agree that the moment when the doors close in the main auditorium is always a thrilling one, it's very comfy, and the pit, courtesy of the Barbican's international theatre seasons, has given me some great evenings.

As I've suggested before, I think it's hard to separate a building from the memories that it evokes, which is perhaps why it takes a long time for us to learn to really love theatres such as the Traverse, Edinburgh, or London's Unicorn when they relocate or rebuild, and why theatres such as the capital's Young Vic and the Royal Court get refurbishments right when they create an architectural continuum with the space we remember before. It may take me a long time to learn to love the Curve in Leicester, which looks like a car park from the outside and an empty shopping centre inside.

For location, it's hard to beat the Minack open-air theatre in Cornwall or the tiny Watermill in Bagnor, Newbury, which on a sunny evening offers ducks as well as drama. And I never tire of going to the Drum in Plymouth, not just because the programming is so brilliantly innovative but also because the coastal train journey between Exeter and Plymouth is so beautiful.

For sheer haunting beauty, Wilton's music hall in London does it for me every time, so much so that I've just written a children's novel in which it features in thinly disguised form, and I love the Theatre Royal in Northampton for its exquisite auditorium and its magical safety curtain. The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds is a gem too. I hope the refurbishment of the Old Vic in Bristol will keep its charm intact. I love London's Roundhouse as a space, but often find it better for music than theatre.

There is something really interesting when architecture and the shows play off each other, which is why Battersea Arts Centre and the Lyric Hammersmith would both be high on my list, particularly when a modern theatrical sensibility is in tension with the Victorian surroundings. The same is true at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. I'm a big fan of the Tobacco Factory in Bristol because the space is so sympathetic, creating an intimacy that rewards really good acting, in the same way as London's Donmar.

Anyway, that's my view – tell me about the spaces you love and the spaces you love to hate.

Just heard a delicious brace of rumors about 14/48’s 2012 Summer offerings.  I am solemnly sworn to secrecy, but suffice it to say that the news involves innovation and once again pushing into territory heretofore unexplored.  Doing the undone is what makes Seattle theatre World Class, and 14/48 has consistently shown "go-big-or-go-home" leadership when the putative leaders of Seattle’s Big Houses have shown little.

Watch this space for more news when I’m allowed to break it, or better yet, “like” 14/48’s Facebook page to get the latest first hand.

The play has split critics. But between rankled newspaper reviewers or enthusiastic bloggers, who is right?

There are plays that divide critics, and then there is Three Kingdoms. Depending on who you read, this collaboration between British playwright Simon Stephens, German director Sebastian Nübling and Estonian designer Ene-Liis Semper, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, is either self-indulgent, overstated, too enigmatic by half, or one of the best pieces of theatre you will see this year, a joyride, a captivating dream.

What's fascinating about this dichotomy is how clearly it's split between newspaper critics who – you guessed it – are resistant to the work, and online writers who embrace it fervently. The divide isn't surprising: Stephens has casually described himself, Nübling and Sean Holmes, the Lyric's artistic director, as "three middle-aged men who all wish we were in the Clash", and there is definitely a punky belligerence about Three Kingdoms, a spirited defiance of anything that smacks of the theatrical mainstream, such as logical storytelling, naturalism or restraint. But is this provocation for the sake of self-gratification, as the old guard would have it? Or are the blogging upstarts right: does Three Kingdoms herald new possibilities for British theatre?

I'm with the latter: watching it, Three Kingdoms felt like that rare beast, a piece of work that could only be made now. For me, its contemporaneity comes from its cunning use of music: the exquisitely performed soundtrack shuffles like an iPod from an Estonian song to the Beatles' Rocky Raccoon, from PJ Harvey's The Last Living Rose to Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, the last inevitably calling to mind the films of David Lynch, which epitomise a whole other set of cultural reference-points, be it cop shows or The Godfather, The Usual Suspects or film noir. And every track either slyly comments on or subtly develops the narrative, and frequently does both at once. Critics who complain that there are too many protracted songs, and that most of them should be cut are, I'd guess, missing the point.

But that's just my individual route. The play and production are rich and adventurous enough to allow every fan their own particular response. Read the online reviews and you realise that no one says quite the same thing: one is struck by the gaze of the actors, another flags up the smells in the text, a third celebrates the humour of the piece, and so on. In other words, the "excess" that exasperates critics required to distil Three Kingdoms down to a brief 500-word review is inspiring and thrilling to writers with unlimited space in which to tease out its complexities. Not only that, while newspaper critics have blamed this excess on Nübling's self-aggrandising direction, online writers celebrate the way his vivid amplification of the text heightens its theatricality. As Dan Rebellato, himself a playwright, puts it: "Nübling is following [Stephens'] intentions in getting inside the play, turning it inside out, shaping and unshaping it in rich, complex ways."

Which makes it all the more alarming that the one thing that most online writers gloss over is the problematic representation of women (Catherine Love at Love Theatre is the notable exception). Three Kingdoms is a piece that touches on globalisation, social dislocation, abuses of humanity and the little-Englander mentality, and which uses a horrific story of sex trafficking as its trigger.

The violence against women in the language is appalling, so is the meticulousness with which the death of a prostitute is detailed, so is the silence of the women on stage – who are spat at, transfigured as deer (the powerless prey of hungry wolves), or reduced to blankly mopping the floor. Yet the general consensus is that the end justifies the means: that the modern world is excoriated through representation.

I appreciate where this is coming from: almost nothing about the play's depiction of women worried me while watching. Afterwards, though, one question resounded in my head: why are women the commodity here and not, for example, drugs or guns? Three Kingdoms offers no explanation, which makes it look dangerously like a play that uses women to tell a story set among men who use women to make themselves rich.

By not tackling this issue in real depth, the online writers risk seeming as entrenched in their approbation of Three Kingdoms as the newspaper critics in their wariness and/or hostility. This matters, because theatre criticism has a role above and beyond the star rating that tells potential audiences whether or not to purchase a ticket. Three Kingdoms plays in London for just two and a half weeks, yet it has the potential to affect British theatre far beyond that.

As Alex Chisholm, associate literary director at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, argued in an essay published online recently, British theatre is riven by unhelpful categories: new writing versus new work, playwrights versus directors, actors versus devisers. For Chisholm, the collaboration between Stephens and Nübling is emblematic of how much more audacious theatre can be when those divisions are erased – and when the artistic directors of buildings allow bold collaborations free rein. She believes this, it's worth observing, not because she's seen Three Kingdoms but because she has read about it online.

Such is the prevailing hierarchy of criticism, however, online writing is still essentially classed as word-of-mouth, while only the reviews published in mainstream media carry real weight. In which case, it's hard not to worry that the message subliminally being communicated by the newspaper critics who resist the unorthodoxy of Three Kingdoms is that unfettered experimentation is not welcome here in the UK. We like straightforward narratives that get to the point; we like characters whose identities and relationships with each other are clear; we like theatricality, but in moderation.

No wonder so much work on British stages in 2012 feels as though it could have been made any time since the 1950s. Perhaps Three Kingdoms really is a gratuitous mess. But a new generation of theatre writers begs to differ – and they might just be the people who help to drag British theatre into the future.

Lyn Gardner pointed the way to Dennis Kelly’s speech “Why political theatre is a complete fucking waste of time” the other day, and despite that puckishly sensational title the speech itself is worth a look for what it says about the efficacy of theatre that describes itself as political — or, at least, as a reaction to political events or ideologies.

Aleks Sierz called Kelly “one of the most distinctive new voices to emerge in the 2000s” and described Kelly as having “an uncanny ability to grasp contentious issues, and to blow apart theatrical form in his search for the most provocative way of addressing a subject” (Sierz 80-81) in his early plays, so it’s instructive to read about Kelly’s growing disillusionment, not with the form of political theatre, but with audience response to it:

I knew that once people saw my argument, things would change. People would listen. The war on terror was essentially over and I fully expected a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of the year. So. I sat back and waited.

This didn’t happen. I got some good reviews, I got some bad reviews, some people liked it, some didn’t and I was commissioned to write a new play. Something was wrong, very wrong. I decided to try again.

To expect that audiences would rise up to hang politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush from lampposts was, he admits, perhaps premature. But his message, it seemed, did even less than that: it stayed within the insular, hermetic world of theatre, revolving around and around, garnering some praise and some dismissal but happily leading to new commissions.

Rather than change the world (and the world needs it, Brecht insisted), Kelly found that he needed to narrow his artistic focus to something that seemed simultaneously more important and more individual — a quest for what he calls truth:

Truth is a tricky thing. It often doesn’t look like itself and it likes to hide. I believe that no-one can know they’re telling the truth — the moment anyone tells you they’re definitely telling you the truth, well for god’s sake just don’t believe them. But everyone can aim for truth. It is something that we can head in the general direction of and hope we get close to. What complicates the journey to truth is the layers of other stuff that gets in the way — our egos and prejudices, our anger, our love, our hate and our desire to do well. But beneath all this lies truth. It is often very hard for a playwright to really know they’re telling the truth. But, unfortunately for us, it’s often very easy for an audience to tell when we’re not. I’ve come to believe in truth as a real thing, not relative, not abstract, but strong and existent. And I’ve come to believe that it is the job of theatre makers who genuinely believe in theatre to somehow try and get close to truth, no matter how hard that may be.

Well, my ears pricked up at that, not least because the question and definition of truth — whether one thinks they possess it or not, or whether on this quest for truth a writer would ever know that he can really recognize it — has been a bit of a bother for a few people recently, not least Mike Daisey and Ira Glass. It’s not that truth itself is hard to define; it’s that there seem to be many kinds of truth — journalistic truth, poetic truth, narrative truth theatrical truth, political truth, scientific truth; one can split this particular hair almost endlessly, and before long one has to go and have a lie-down.

But Kelly here is attempting to define a very complex and delicate kind of truth — the truth that resides in individual consciousness, and to call it “truth” simplifies this consciousness. This “truth” is based upon an individual experience of the world, and while it takes this experience as its fodder, it is also based in prejudice, ideology, and conviction, all of which resist any status as “truth” as we might find it in the court of either the justice system, the theatre, or public opinion. But it is this truth, however provisional, that the artist must seek to express.

It’s when prejudice is promulgated as truth that it becomes potentially deadly. Marxism, like any political approach, is a useful lens and set of tools through which culture and society can be analyzed; it’s when it’s been taken as ideological truth and enters the world of realpolitik that it becomes dangerous. But I think the reason why Kelly’s audiences failed to pick up pitchforks and torches and march to 10 Downing Street was that they recognized this status — that they were, perhaps, smarter than Kelly gave them credit for; and I read between the lines in his essay that he recognizes this now.

In addition to his injunction to “try and get close to truth,” Kelly offers one more:

I believe young theatre makers need a very healthy dose of “go fuck yourself.” I think it’s useful for a young theatre maker to look at the things they’re being told, to think about them, assess them and then — if necessary — say “go fuck yourself.” … I’m sure that right now in this audience there are people listening to this and thinking “go fuck yourself,” and that is actually right and proper and good luck to you. Although please don’t feel it necessary to tell me after — let’s just assume that I’m already going to go fuck myself in some way or other. But if over the next couple of days, or weeks or months or years you are thinking “go fuck yourself” then that’s not a bad thing. But just make sure it comes from the right place. Make sure it comes not from arrogance or an inability to see your own flaws, but from a desire to change things, from a belief in the power of theatre that is bigger than writers, directors, artistic directors and dramaturges, that it belongs to all of us and is never to be taken for granted.

And of course the best time to tell somebody to go fuck themselves is when they promise to be the sole repository of truth — about society, politics, or anything else — because this is the most emphatic clue that whatever they’re about to tell you, whether they’re a playwright or a politician, a performer or a pundit, is, by definition, a lie.

That said, Kelly’s essay is essential reading for anyone seeking to create political theatre. I disagree with some of his conclusions — “Theatre lies in emotion; it is an emotional medium, not really an intellectual one,” he writes; theatre is a visceral immediate experience, but certainly it partakes of both emotion and intellect, as well as eroticism and spirit, the body and the mind; there’s no need to engage in this kind of binary differentiation. I agree with others — Edward Bond’s The Hidden Plot is an essential book for understanding the political possibilities of contemporary drama.

Among the greatest explicitly political dramas of the twentieth century, The Measures Taken, St. Joan of the Stockyards, and even The Investigation, perhaps to date the greatest of all documentary, verbatim drama (all these are German plays, making these examples appropriate to the context of Kelly’s speech), end not with firm uncontrovertible truth, but with continuing mystery — of motivation, of character, of the dynamics which drive the characters to action — of why human beings continue to treat each other, and the world they live in, the way they do. “Change the world, it needs it,” was Brecht’s own injunction; but clearly, as both Kelly and Brecht continue to warn, it is the individual who needs to change first.

Again, the full text of Kelly’s speech is here.

Transcendental Wild Oats Read by Dylan Lamb, Grace Folsom, Jessie Barr, Liz Alderfer, Bix Bettwy, and Nathaniel Kent Directed by Laura Lashley Wednesday, May 16th 7:00 pm, 6th Floor Ensemble Studio Theater Followed by Eric Dufault's riotous "The Last Great Telemarketer" at 9:00 (Do you like how I temper expectations by choosing the most boring image on the planet to represent my

British playwright Dennis Kelly, whose musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel Matilda is scheduled to land on Broadway next year following a triumphant run at the Royal Shakespeare Company, gave the opening speech at this year’s Theatertreffen festival in Berlin. The title of his speech: “Why political theatre is a complete fucking waste of time.” Potent words calculated to raise hackles, especially given that Kelly’s first few plays, Osama the Hero and After the End, put him on the map as one of Britain’s more politically inclined young playwrights. His full remarks can be found here.

But on to happier matters. Terry Teachout filed his 500th column as the Wall Street Journal‘s chief drama critic this week; in this post on his blog, About Last Night, he takes a brief look back. Terry began writing for the WSJ — and started his blog — only a few months before I started Superfluities in 2003 (we began to correspond and meet occasionally for lunch and a few theatre outings shortly thereafter), and what a long strange trip it’s been for the both of us. He has proven not only a continuing champion of the blogosphere’s ability to disseminate important arts criticism ordinarily marginalized by the mainstream press; he has also remained intensely committed to the health of the regional theatre scene, which he covers with a frequency and seriousness that has no parallel. Mine and Terry’s aesthetic paths have diverged, to put it mildly, but he was the first critic to give an early play of mine a rave review, and that it came from a writer with such indisputable and uncompromising critical integrity has meant all the world. He and I remain in friendly contact, despite our differences, and I offer him my own best wishes as his own first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, opens at the Long Wharf Theatre this fall.

Oakland May Day 2012.

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/41715276" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="500"></iframe>

Visual effects made in Quartz Composer. Audio built in Audacity 2.

How different would stage history be without Desdemona's handkerchief? These uncredited accomplices are a vital part of the theatre experience

In Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, which has just finished its run on the Brighton fringe festival, a new actor, fresh to the script each night, walks on stage with a small glass vial. During the course of the play, its contents are emptied by an audience member into one of two glasses of water, which the actor will soon be asked to choose between and drink. Someone from the theatre venue has been asked to fill the vial with poison, we are told. Probably, Soleimanpour muses, they've opted for a safe substitute like sugar. But perhaps, just perhaps, the staff member has interpreted him literally. Maybe it's arsenic …

To my knowledge, no one has yet died performing the Iranian playwright's allegorical show about group culpability (which, facilitated by its unique format, continues to tour the world in several countries at once). And let's be honest, no one is likely to. But watching a performance last week, I was struck by the notion that this humble prop – ordered by the playwright, administered by the audience member, imbibed by the actor, yet selected and supplied by someone whose name probably wouldn't even appear in the programme – had the power to affect the whole course of the show.

We often underappreciate stage props and prop design. The major theatre awards, after all, include no "best props" category, simply sweeping them in under "set design" (the key difference being that a prop gets used or touched). We know that props can be magical things: talismanic, transformational. We get that Shakespeare wouldn't be Shakespeare – and unimaginative programme designers the world over would be up the proverbial creek – without Desdemona's handkerchief or Macbeth's dagger. From The Woman In Black to the work of, say, Idle Motion, we celebrate theatre in which props assist imagination and play. But what about the impact prop choice can have within a production? What creative freedoms, extended by the playwright to the props person, can affect the outcome of a show?

The first week of the Brighton festival offered ample encouragement to give more props to stage props. During a revival of Vanishing Point's almost wordless show Interiors at Theatre Royal Brighton on Wednesday, the biggest laugh went to a houseplant. (Whoever sourced this curious, mangy, quietly obtrusive horticultural specimen, given by a dinner party guest to his host, had clearly taken the ensuing line "What the fuck is that?" as a serious challenge.) In Dreamthinkspeak's The Rest Is Silence, the Jo Nesbo novel among Hamlet's strewn belongings sounds – for anyone who spots it – a note of brutally modernist Nordic noir. Meanwhile Brighton festival and House 2012's immersive installation Hangover Square painstakingly "recreates" two sets from an imagined film version of Patrick Hamilton's novel as if their occupants had just been removed by the police. From the half-smoked Player's Navy Cut cigarettes to the bloody golf club, it's a sort of fetishisation of the prop.

A prop isn't just capable of affecting subtle changes in how we view a character – it can help the actor get in to the role. Remember the Polish pianist who bequeathed his skull to the RSC and ended up playing Yorrick to David Tenant's Hamlet? Concerned that the publicity would prove distracting, the company announced they'd be opting for a plastic version for the London run. Later it emerged they'd been using André Tchaikowsky all along. The real skull was "a profound memento mori, which perhaps no prop skull could quite provide".

If you're dubious that varying the prop can have a pronounced effect on a performance, props that have to be sourced afresh each night offer an interesting opportunity to experiment. One actor acquaintance has used his one-man trilogy about the Romantic actor Edmund Kean to make a study of the comedic properties of the carrot. Required to eat one per show (a sort of prop rotation, if you will), he observes how different shapes and sizes of vegetable affect audience response. The optimum comic carrot? "Big and grotesquely phallic, or very long, thin and crooked."

So, this weekend the worm turned and now it's time for the world to rise up in arms against David Sedaris. If by arms we mean "strongly worded media insider blog posts and tweets" and by world we mean "obsessive guardians of media orthodoxy with time on their hands now that the Lena Dunham thing is in remission". 

Even the WaPo article that set off this "firestorm" has a hard time finding anyone who gives a shit about this, and you know Eric Farhi was calling far and wide to get the incensed comments needed to start this fire. Okay, maybe "incensed" was never going to happen—for an argument like this apparently all you need is media's new horrified buzzword: BLURRY LINES. 

BLURRY LINES is the new watchword, presumably because in a more perfect world none of our lines would ever be blurry, and that would solve the deep, entrenched problems in our media.

Except it doesn't. If people actually gave a sincere shit about BLURRY LINES, we'd be talking about FOX News. But media pundits get tired of talking about FOX News because it never goes anywhere, because FOX News is a massive corporation who frankly doesn't give a shit about these pundits, and ignores them. And humans hate being ignored.

So instead of doing the hard work of chipping away at real media injustices, it's easier to find an individual, who are always less armored than corporations are, and shit on them, because then you can make your points and pretend that you moved the needle. And the left has never tired of policing its own—a pattern we see again and again, as I write these words in a cellar bar in Prague—so why not see if we can get Sedaris fact-checked?

First, no-one is upset with Mr. Sedaris' work. NO ONE. No one is listening to SANTALAND DIARIES and then saying to themselves, "I am now informed about the true nature of Macy's elf policies from the early nineties, which is good as I am writing a PhD thesis on that very subject." No one is calling NPR complaining that they were terribly tricked by Mr. Sedaris' feelings about the pleasures of smoking, or cutlery, or whatever the fuck it is that David is talking about. No one cares what is factually accurate in the details of what his aunt said to him in his childhood, except maybe his family members, and they should be fucking used to it by now.

Second, this is about me, not David Sedaris. It's about what I did on TAL, and how everyone, including me, agrees it was unethical. We've had an entire hour of TAL dedicated to retracting that episode, and then hundreds of articles across the world wherein every last person who writes for a newspaper agreed that my actions violated journalistic trust. I've been open with the media and spoken publicly repeatedly about my actions, and I've apologized fully and completely for those whose trust I've breached. I haven't vanished, I'm right here, and I'm accountable for the decisions I have made.

You want to talk about that some more, fine. But it's mine. It's not the vanguard of some "movement", like one of those NYT Style section pieces where we've found two instances of something and now there is a "trend". It's not an excuse for media watchdogs to clamp down as though they are protecting the public from stories as though they need their food chewed for them.

None of this gives anyone the right to go headhunting for someone else who did *nothing* I have done, who has been open and clear in his work, and with whom no one has an argument. It's despicable. Just because you can't find any more meat on my bones in this matter doesn't allow you the right to hunt someone else. 

Leave David Sedaris the fuck alone.

NPR Frets About David Sedaris and It Is Mike Daisey's Fault

This is the problem with “This American Life” — it has conditioned listeners to accept creative nonfiction as a journalistic-ish mode of storytelling. Perhaps it should simply embrace the blurring that goes on in creative nonfiction and state that clearly to its audience.

Steve Burns as Senator Carl Corpuscle in CONFESS YOUR BUBBLE (Photo: Kyle Ancowitz)

Tickets are now available for CONFESS YOUR BUBBLE, my new play, starring Steve Burns and directed by Kyle Ancowitz. We are a part of the Democracy Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg Brooklyn.

Now is the time to purchase. To engage in purchasing. It is your God given right as a consumer. No, it's your responsibility. Think about My Economy.

Thursday, June 21st 8pm
Friday, June 22nd 8pm
Saturday, June 23rd 5pm
Sunday, June 24th 8pm
Tuesday, June 26th 8pm
Saturday, June 30th, 8pm

Babel's producers talk their way out of a tight corner, the loss of support for public subsidy – plus is political theatre really a total waste of time?

Babble around Babel

Babel, the centrepiece of the World Stages London season, turned out to be a towering disappointment. The Telegraph's Charles Spencer, the Times's Libby Purves, myself in the Guardian and other critics were all pretty unequivocal about that in their reviews.

But, amusingly, a full page advert in today's G2 headlined "The People Have Spoken!" offers a series of quotes from people called Nisha, Kyle and Ambra (no surnames provided) who all say what a terrific time they had. I wonder whether the advert was booked prior to the reviews appearing, in the expectation that the copy would be filled with ecstatic quotes from the critics? If that was the case, there clearly had to be a swift change of plan after press night. Whatever the scenario, Babel raises some interesting issues around failure, particularly in the context of participatory work, which is often as much about process as it is about product and the role of producers – and also whether pre-show hype can have the adverse effect of generating way too much expectation around a project.

Job vacancy section

"Great news that Vicky Featherstone is taking over at London's Royal Court. I think she'll be terrific!" tweeted James Corden from New York, neatly summing up the delight that greeted the announcement on Friday afternoon of Featherstone's appointment as the Court's first female artistic director. Of course Sloane Square's gain is the National Theatre of Scotland's loss, and already the contenders for that pivotal role are being discussed and lined up here. Whoever gets the job, Featherstone will be a hard act to follow.

Falling support for subsidy?

"If this government gets another term, then there's no doubt subsidy will decline," said the National Theatre's chief executive Nick Starr when we were talking a couple of weeks ago. That doesn't mean that we should stop making the arguments to government, but we need to make them much more cogently – even if all we are doing, to paraphrase the great Samuel Beckett, is failing better.

With the government seemingly unable to understand the facts of life about subsidy (George Osborne clearly thinks War Horse and Matilda were delivered by stork) theatre's best hope for maintaining levels of subsidy is by winning the argument with audiences and a wider public. On this front, things are not looking good. Arts Council England's latest Stakeholder Focus Research shows that public support for government subsidy for the arts has fallen from 52% to 44 % in the last three years. Even more worryingly, the number of those who oppose arts subsidy is on the up from 14% in 2009 to 19%. Sure, the state of the economy probably has some bearing on these figures, but we would be daft to stick our heads in the sand and ignore them.

What audiences want

Audiences were very much the focus of the Getting It Out There symposium at the Nuffield in Lancaster on 19 May, when theatre-makers, producers, programmers and representatives from the Arts Council met to discuss the challenges facing experimental theatre and live art. As Helen Cole of Bristol's In Between Time said: "As soon as you start making assumptions about your audience, it means you only programme what you think they want." Glasgow producer Steve Slater commented that it is "only by understanding who is coming that we can understand who isn't", and Kate McGrath of Fuel suggested that we should stop talking about "the work" because "audiences don't want to go to 'the work'; they want to go and have a good time".

Political truth

Finally – is politics dead? Playwright Dennis Kelly thinks so, at least when it comes to his own work. "Personally, I no longer really like to talk of plays that are political and not political," he says in a speech to mark the opening of the Stückemarkt at the Berlin Festspiele. "Instead, now I prefer to talk about plays that have meaning and plays that sort of don't." The title of his talk? Why Political Theatre is a Complete Fucking Waste of Time. Glad we've got that clear.

UPDATE (7.30pm): Allow me to be among the first to say congratulations — mission accomplished.

---

There are now 15 hours left in the LuckyAnt fundraising drive to save the Living Theatre. The campaign seeks to raise $24,000, which would permit the group “to pay its rent, bring in a consultant to develop a five-year strategic plan, and turn itself into a financially sustainable arts organization.” As of this hour, they are about $6,000 short of their goal.

The Living Theatre has been one of the most influential collectives in the life of the American theatre. You can help continue their 65-year history by making a donation to reach their goal. Below, Judith Malina, who founded the Living Theatre with Julian Beck, makes the argument for your support. Donations can be made here.
<iframe align="middle" frameborder="0" height="309" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/41329331" style="margin-top: 25px;" width="549"></iframe>

Here.

I guess I can't help myself.  But also I cannot help believing that unless we speak up-- especially when we have this short-lived national spotlight-- everyone will assume that it's all going peachy and in the right direction, when the sweet Lord knows it ain't.

So join the fray if you can.  We need intelligent voices to counter the advocates of half-measures, old thinking, and worst of all: "politeness-at-all-costs." 

Financial Times of London Review:

What is undeniable is Daisey’s huge energy and immaculate comic timing. He delivers his monologue sitting at a table under a spotlight, his only props some notes and a glass of water: it’s an intense experience, often funny and sometimes very moving.

Few people believe Daisey was right to mislead his audiences; the issue, how our heedless choices affect tens of thousands of factory workers, is too important. But what those who gave Daisey a standing ovation at HighTide were applauding, I think, was his ability to speak to their consciences, to open their eyes. His monologue is a piece of theatre unlike any other I’ve experienced – like HighTide’s programming, it’s not flawless, but it is brave.

Took me two minutes tops over at Brown Paper Tickets.  You better do the same soon or you could be wearing your hoodie out in the cold.

Here’s the all the latest updated information from producer Tyrone Brown.

HOODIES UP!

An Awareness and Fundraising Event
for the Trayvon Martin Foundation

 

Seattle, WA – May 11, 2012. Brownbox Theatre presents HOODIES UP! Featuring original short plays written by seven Seattle-based playwrights. The production will be presented for one performance at 7:30pm on Friday, May 18, 2012 at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center in historic Columbia City.

The playwrights charge for HOODIES UP!? Write a short play “inspired” by the Trayvon Martin tragedy, no more than 10 minutes in length, utilizing any writing style, and include at least one “hooded” character:

“We Have So Much To Learn” by Kathya Alexander
“Bottom Line” by Jose' Amador
“Is This The Day, Walking While Black?” by Najee Sui-Chang
“Trees In The Window” by Lois Mackey
“White Boy Can Take A Punch” by Paul Mullin
“An/Other” by Nick Stokes
“End Of The Rainbow” by Sharon N. Williams

The HOODIES UP! plays feature direction by Jose’ Amador, Maggie Holmes, Pearl Klein, Danny Long, and Andy Jensen. The production will feature the talents of 15-20 local actors, designers, and community members representing a variety of social, political, and cultural backgrounds.

HOODIES UP! is an “awareness and fundraising” event. All ticket sales and funds collected will be donated to the Justice for Trayvon Martin Foundation - http://justicetm.org/ - as part the Advocacy Campaign for Truth by Sybrina Fulton & Tracy Martin.

Performance and Ticket Information

Date: Friday, May 18, 2012 at 7:30pm

Venue: Rainier Valley Cultural Center, 3515 South Alaska Street, Seattle, WA 98118

Web and Phone: www.rainiervalleyculturalcenter.org / (206) 725-7517

Purchase Tickets: 1(800)838-2006 or www.brownpapertickets.com/event/244954

Advance Tickets: $15.00 / $5.00 (17 and under)

At The Door: $20.00 / $7.00 (17 and under)

Dreamthinkspeak's 'meditation on Hamlet' triumphs at the Brighton festival and there's a last chance to see Swallows and Amazons in Cardiff

North and Wales

Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm heads to Northern Stage next week. Unfolding Theatre's Best in the World, which focuses on darts championships, is at Harrogate Theatre this weekend and at the Arc in Stockton on Tuesday. Analogue's 2401 Objects may not be this terrific company's best show, but it's still worth seeing at the Dukes in Lancaster tomorrow night. John Simm stars in Pinter's Betrayal at the Sheffield Crucible from next Thursday. Further east, Shared Experience's Mary Shelley is at Hull Truck and a Zimbabwean two-man version of Hamlet is at the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough tomorrow. The fine revival of Alan Plater's mining drama, Close the Coalhouse Door, goes into Salford's Lowry. At Contact in Manchester, you can catch Gecko's Missing this weekend, and then Amy Lamé's Unhappy Birthday at the end of the week.

Central and East

Good times at the Curve in Leicester, which has Tender Napalm (see above) this weekend before the arrival of the Emma Rice-directed east London meets Bollywood musical, Wah! Wah! Girls. There's still time to catch Stan's Café's The Cardinals at Warwick Arts Centre tonight. The end of the week sees the start of the Royal and Derngate's Festival of Chaos, which begins with a new version of The Bacchae performed in old printing press rooms in Northampton. New Perspectives' tour of the Honey Man is a great little show and is touring rural village halls this week. Look on the website for details.

There's a last chance this weekend to catch the rest of the HighTide Festival in Halesworth in Suffolk: Vickie Donoghue's deliciously sparky Mudlarks and the latest (but as yet unseen) from Ella Hickson are the main draws. I hope the rain holds off for Close Act's Invasion, which will bring huge beasts to the streets of Norwich at the start of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival tonight. Also check out the family-friendly Garden Party tomorrow and other treats including Quarantine's beautiful Susan and Darren, Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe's The Oh Fuck Moment and the community-inspired Rimini Protokoll show, 100% Norwich at the Theatre Royal Norwich from next Friday.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The new MAC in Belfast has a hit with Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry 1912). Over in Glasgow, it's your last chance (at until it heads to London in the autumn) to catch Enquirer, National Theatre of Scotland's examination of the press, at the Hub in Glasgow. Have children? Last chance, too, for Edinburgh's brilliant Imaginate festival – though King Lear at the Citizens might make you think again about the wisdom of having kids. Staying at the Citz, it's your first chance for the return of 27, Abi Morgan's play about faith, science and ageing. The Tron's Mayfesto season continues with Gavin Kostick's very watchable Fight Night. At the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, meanwhile, you have until tomorrow to catch Howard Brenton's enjoyable Anne Boleyn. Also until tomorrow in Edinburgh, Martin McDonagh's dark, dark comedy of extremism, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, is at the Lyceum. Plus the classic washhouse heartwarmer, The Steamie, stops off at the Macrobert in Stirling.

London

You should really head to Camden People's Theatre for the daring pairing of Crunch and Hitch, two solo shows from brilliant young Scottish artists, Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley, about the state we're in and rethinking capitalism. I love the sound of The Pirate Project, which I'm going to catch at Oval House this week. Toujours et Pres de Mois sounds somewhat French and a bit spooky (it uses the old Pepper's Ghost trick) at the Print Room. Cape Town's Isango Ensemble are at Hackney Empire with versions of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and La Bohème. The Conquest of the South Pole is excellent at the Arcola, and Simon Stephens's Three Kingdoms shocking and visceral at the Lyric Hammersmith. The Man With the Disturbingly Smelly Foot is good for the over-sevens at the Unicorn .

Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape is revived at Southwark Playhouse . Laura Wade's Bullingdon Club play, Posh, goes into the Duke of York's in the West End. Two Roses for Richard, a circus and multi-media inspired version of Shakespeare's history plays, is worth checking out at the Roundhouse from next Friday. Head to BAC this weekend for Francesca Millican-Slater's Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs, a wonderful story of postcards, mystery and identity, and do check out the iPad show, Alma Mater, while you're at it. David Harrow's A Slow Air at the Tricycle was much liked when seen in Scotland. Detroit, a comedy about suburban American, opens at the NT.

South-west and Wales

Head to Bristol from next Thursday for Mayfest – Kindles' mad and madly enjoyable The Furies, Andy Field's Motor Vehicle Sundown, and OtherWayWorks' Avon Calling are just a few of the many draws. The Ustinov in Bath has the UK premiere of Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, a story of sex and intimacy in the late 19th century. The Brighton festival continues, and this week you should obviously check out The Rest is Silence, Dreamthinkspeak's version of Hamlet, but also think about Requardt and Rosenberg's Motor Show and any of the shows in the caravan lineup. Details here. Plenty of interest on the Brighton Fringe, too, including Rhum and Clay's Shutterland and Ripley Theatre's hugely enjoyable The Jolly Folly of Polly the … (yep, that's the full title). Michael Wynne's Canvas at the Minerva in Chichester is a comedy about camping. And Idle Motion says goodbye to The Vanishing Horizon at the Theatre Royal Winchester on Tuesday.

In Wales, meanwhile, it's your last chance for Swallows and Amazons, which winds up its long tour at the New Theatre in Cardiff, and Frantic Assembly is at the Patti Pavillion in Swansea with the Dylan Thomas-inspired Little Dogs. Plus there's Nikolai Foster's revival of Merrily We Roll Along and a new play called Bruised are both of interest at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold.

As ever, have a good weekend and do let me know the shows you are enjoying most. And don't forget, if you're using Twitter, use the #gdnreview hashtag to let us know what you thought – we'll round up the best.

Adam Szymkowicz notes that 13P, having made a significant impact on the New York theater scene, will end its mission and close up shop after its next production.

Two thoughts.

One: I'd like to reiterate Adam's great question. If you had to gather a new 13P, a collective of super playwrights, today...who would you choose?

Second, I admire a nonprofit that fulfills its mission and ends its work. As many of us see in the nonprofit world, once a new organization gets to work, it can fall into the rut of perpetuating itself out of a sort of reflex, revisioning its mission, just existing to exist. Setting a goal that can be achieved, and then achieving it? That's a rare feat.

There's a football saying that "on any given Sunday, anything could happen."  You could win or lose, become injured or become legendary. In other words, nobody knows what's going to happen. Teams practice, they prepare, they have an idea of what they'll do...but nobody knows what the final score will be.  Same is true of playwriting.  Typically we write plays knowing very little. Rarely

Howard Barker’s 1970 play No One Was Saved formed the basis of Made, a 1972 film directed by John Mackenzie and starring Roy Harper and Carol White; Barker himself wrote the screenplay. Eight years later, Barker said that the filming of the play was “a disastrous and painful experience which exposed to me the commercial degredation of the industry here, as far as studios are concerned.” (Brown 25) Rabey describes the play (pp 20-22):

No One Was Saved sustains the theme of exploitation, characteristic of this period of his work, here focused in the story of a working-class unmarried mother, written as an act of double-edged criticism: of Edward Bond’s play Saved (staged 1965) and of the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby.” Barker:

“I’d gone to Saved on the strength of a review we’d read saying that this was life in South London epitomized. We just didn’t think that this was so — we didn’t understand much about what Bond was trying to do with the language of the play. That was why I wrote Cheek, and also why I took up the gang of youths from Saved and used them in No One Was Saved …

“The song had a rare concern with despair and defeat — very unlike a modern pop song — but I was always suspicious of the Beatles, and Lennon in particular: all the financial manipulation and posturing with maharishis struck me firmly then as an indictment of the Sixties. So I created a fantasy in which Lennon had actually known this girl Eleanor Rigby, who was not an old woman as I thought the song implied, and served her up as song material.”

It is a piece of early Barker — apprenticeship work and perhaps juvenilia, and only approachable bearing Barker’s characterization of the production in mind, but quite rare. The film can be seen in full below.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" height="402" width="549"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/X3b_gLl6fWk?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="402" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/X3b_gLl6fWk?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="549"></object>

A blogger accuses the theatre of pandering to rather than provoking the middle classes, while audience etiquette hits the headlines

Has the Royal Court lost its way? Reviewing Mike Bartlett's Love, Love, Love – favourably, it must be said – playwright and academic Dan Rebellato wants us to at least consider the possibility.

The location of this famous home of the theatrical kitchen sink has left it with a conundrum, since, perched on the east side of Sloane Square, its neighbours are the (nowadays) wealthy burghers of Chelsea. Is the theatre's role to stage plays attacking or supporting its audience? Should it sock it to 'em, or cosy up to 'em?

When Dominic Cooke took over as artistic director in 2006, he publicly announced that he was out to scrutinise and skewer the middle classes. The plays he staged – from That Face to Tribes to Clybourne Park – regularly applied a critical eye to the lifestyle and attitude of the well-fed folk in the stalls. They could be harshly accusatory and deeply uncomfortable to sit through.

Six years on, though, Rebellato wonders whether these dramas have lost their edge and drifted towards boulevard comedy – "an invention," he explains, "of 19th-century Paris … a kind of comedy for the knowing, man-about-town … cheeky, saucy, sexual, but respectable, curvaceous and corseted."

"Sometimes I think the scrutiny can be blunted," he continues, "by a knowing complicity of audience and stage, and by the corseted neatness of play and production." In other words, Rebellato argues that the stock Royal Court audience has grown accustomed to – indeed, come to actively enjoy – being the centre of attention. It's pandering to the audience that it ought to confront. Allons enfants de la Chelsea …

Audiences have faced another kind of scrutiny as well this week, after The Stage's Mark Shenton used his blog to admonish none other than Bianca Jagger for snapping pictures of the new London revival of Einstein on the Beach from the stalls – as Charlotte Higgins reported earlier this week. Of course, audience etiquette is a favourite hobbyhorse amongst theatre bloggers, but this week Jana Perkovic – a Melbourne-based blogger currently in Berlin – offers a timely reminder that not all audiences are the same. "Theatre is a social situation by definition, by design," Perkovic argues, suggesting that, as audience members, we should recognise that and behave accordingly – as individuals within a temporary community. "If you're going to the theatre, you're going there to engage with your society." Surely no one needs a rulebook to manage that.

Community is, indeed, something theatres try to achieve in a variety of ways. Brant Russell leads post-show discussions for Steppenwolf Theatre and believes they play a vital role in the theatre's everyday (or everynight) life. "By virtue of watching the same performance," he writes, "every member of the audience is an expert." I rather like, though, a few more straightforward pieces of advice – "ignore assholes" and "get out of the way."

One show that almost needs a post-show discussion every time is DV8's danced essay on multiculturalism Can We Talk About This? Fortunately, Exeunt's Diana Damian has subsequently interviewed its director Lloyd Newson – an interesting model that elevates acuity above publicity. Newson mentions a French theatre that refused to give the piece a run because a quarter of their local audience is Muslim. "I think that's absolutely insulting to the Muslims in Marseilles for assuming they all think alike," he tells Damian, "and it shows you white French liberals are censoring; taking responsibility for what Muslims can and can't see. Is that multiculturalism?" Quite a thought to end on, if Newson's analysis is accurate – maybe it's time for that theatre to provoke its audience, rather than pandering to them?

Einstein on The Beach and The Queen of the North kick off a weekly roundup of reader reviews

Welcome to a brand new blog series highlighting our favourite reader reviews from around the site. We know from your comments, many or you want to share your verdict on the performances you've just seen, but the reviews can be spread out between different comment threads and Twitter as many more readers tweet us their thoughts using the hashtag #Gdnreview. So, this is our first stab at a solution; a weekly roundup blog, but if you have any suggestions how this could be done better, please tell me in the comments below, I'm all ears. Now, on with this week.

Einstein on the Beach

AndrewRose:

Dialogue, music and movement move in subtly changing circles in Einstein on the Beach, creating scenes that are both repetitious and evolving.
The idea behind this total theatrical methodology is that one becomes immersed in the aesthetic experience. In contrast to this desired end, I found myself initially frustrated with the pace at which the performance was moving. I wanted something to 'happen'. However, as Glass correctly observes, Einstein on the Beach is a performance 'that teaches you how to hear it.' Thus, my initial impatience was quickly quelled and I found myself becoming more and more entranced by the performance... In short, Einstein on the beach deserved the standing ovation that it received at the end of the performance on May 5th, but not because it stands as it once did, as a technically brilliant feat of audio-visual theatrical wizardry that stretches the confines of the theatrical medium and tells us more about the world that we live in. Einstein on the Beach has become a theatrical antique. It is still a fantastic experience but the greatest joy in experiencing it comes in the recognition that you are watching a seminal performance that has helped to shape the theatrical world that has followed in its footsteps.

tootifrooti:

I was there on Friday night and felt really disappointed, no, distressed. I felt as if I had sat through a dress rehearsal. The unexpected break because of the problems with the moving elements was the least of it really. There were constant distractions, many of which should have been ironed out before the show. Bungled lighting cues, wobbling, jerky set elements (almost comical at times), something dropped with a loud clatter off scene whilst artists were performing... I could go on...I know it was live, ambitious, etc, etc, however I have seen many, many, live, ambitious performances over the years and never have I witnessed such a technical shambles. The audience were very forgiving.

The Queen of the North

stoon1:

Star rating: 2.75/5

If you're looking for a nostalgia fix to stir Pat Phoenix memories with added impersonations of her giving it Northern Kitchen sink verbals you'll love it! Beyond that you're struggling.
Post show, I learnt far more about her in 5m by flicking thru the excellent prog than during the previous 110m which focuses on her various attempts to get hitched. Lynda Rooke is more effective when in company than during the monologues which are too "Friends, Romans countryman" veneered to allow access to the soul.
Despite the perpetual heartbreak it's best described as light ent - fine but some characters add unnecessary light headedness whilst others seem token.
Then there's the absence of glitz, glamour n stardust – granted it's her 'private' side on display, but there's a need to create a sense of what having 20m tv viewers actually meant – flashbulbs, tabloid exclusives and endless weekly magazine covers, interviews, fan mail for a start.

Trisha Brown Dance Company

oldmuskrat:

Well we stayed until the end. About four people in our row had left by the interval. Liked If you couldn't see me the best, somehow. Les Yeux seemed so-so. The marching band was wicked in Foray Foret but it was a distraction and made your mind wander (the next best thing about it were the gold exotic costumes by Rauschenberg lit by slabs of blue light.) During a silent passage someone's phone went off and two people stomped out of the stalls.

How to leave a review

You can tweet us a review of any performance using the hashtag #Gdnreview, or tell us what you recommend by leaving a comment on Lyn Gardner's weekly What to see this week blog. Alternatively, you can tweet us @Guardianstage.

We were like...

I’m currently writing a play called The Secret of the Biological Clock, about a former girl detective who is turning 37 and wants to solve the mystery of what makes a family. I have spent the past two months flipping out about stage directions.

Stage directions.

The play itself is a mystery with overtones of spy movies. There are daring escapes and bomb plots. I’ve reread a bunch of Nancy Drew mysteries and I wanted to incorporate all the various outlandish plot points into this play, keeping it in balance with the very real aspects of someone not dealing with aging and wondering if she really wants to have a kid.

You would think this play would have me running off blithely into the land of the impossible stage directions. It has to – right?

Except I’m terrified of them.

It seems silly to say terrified – but I have spent the past month or so double and triple guessing something as simple as “The figure escapes out the attic window.”

This is not something that a rational person would be flipping out about. This isn’t something that I would have flipped out about when I started out as a playwright. I went through some really amazing training during my time at DePaul University, mostly with the excellent Carlos Murillo, who while not a fan of stage directions in general, did like assignments that included impossible ones.

This is new found fear is born of a bunch of various messages that I have internalized since graduation.

Some of these messages are pretty explicit. I’ve been told that my writing isn’t dramatic. That was a comment from a concerned (and otherwise pretty cool individual) that kept me from writing anything for three years. I’ve been told that I “can’t do that on stage,” and shouldn’t I be writing a screenplay or novel instead.

But most of the messages aren’t that direct. As a female playwright, the odds are already against me getting produced. They’re even worse in Miami, which has a hyper-masculine theatre culture and artistically prefers what I’ve called “plays where people throw chairs.” 1970s Steppenwolf is idolized by many of our artistic directors, and while we share a tendency to romanticize Chicago theatre – the Chicago Theatre I’m romanticizing is a completely different genre.

I’ve been part of conversations among playwrights that I love and respect on how Sarah Ruhl is too cutesy and trying too hard. Even worse, I’ve seen local productions of truly amazing women’s plays get trashed for being too whimsical. I think Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days is a delightful script with the amazing choice of having the characters of Jesus and Stephen Hawking played by the same actor. But Florida Stage’s production wasn’t well received by many local artists and Florida Stage’s audience. It wasn’t nominated for the Best New Work Carbonell the year it won the Steinberg Award. I’ve heard that whimsical plays are clever, but that a much more straightforward play can really get at the gut of the human experience.

It took a reading of In Common Hours for two of the smartest dramaturgical minds I know to get the play. It’s a delicate, domestic comedy and the charm of the play only landed for them in the hearing of it, and not on the page.

As playwright, you want everything to land on the page – so I worked to fit into the mold. I could write smaller, more straight forward, more realistic, more traditionally structured. I would write something that would be respectable. I boxed myself in and wrote a traditionally structured, five character play.

If I followed all the rules, then I would be a real playwright.

Except I was a real playwright all along and the play where I only partly followed the rules is the play that has been produced.

I’ve only now found the courage to go back to telling the types of stories that I was completely comfortable telling in college. I graduated seven years ago. And even now, I don’t have the ease of writing those stories that I had back then. Instead I flip out about stage directions.

It took flipping out about stage directions for me to realize how much I have internalized all the various messages I’ve heard and witnessed over the past seven years. And it’s even sadder that I felt the need for permission from others to embrace something that used to be instinctual to my process.

For those of us who work in this field – what are the messages we’re sending out about the value of women’s stories and storytelling? There’s been a lot of wonderful mobilization around gender parity since the Guthrie, but in addition to fighting for more women’s stories, what are we saying about those stories themselves? And what messages are we sending to women playwrights, intentionally and unintentionally?

And to the folks (admittedly all male) who have told me over the past week or so that if people don’t understand my play, they shouldn’t be directing it, I would like to say thank you. It’s unfortunate that I needed to hear that from multiple sources for this greater realization to sink in. Just because I work in this community doesn’t mean I have to let it define me as an artist. I can define myself on my own terms.

It's been a few weeks, but My Mind Is Like An Open Meadow is gearing up to once again hit the open road. If you happen to be in the Salem area on Monday May 14, join Erin for an evening performance at Western Oregon University.

Monday, May 14
7:30pm: Rice Auditorium Studio Theatre (at the corner of Knox St & Powell St)
Tickets: $5 at the door
Western Oregon Univsersity
Monmouth, OR

And on Tuesday, after you wow yourself at the Big Art Group lecture at PICA, sneak over to Valentines for a fancy cocktail and a little entertainment from us (and others). The event is called International Waters and it's all coming together to kick off the Portland Passport Project. Many thanks to the hosts, Portland's own Research Club.

Tuesday, May 15
7pm - late: Valentines (232 SW Ankeny St, Portland, OR)
$5 at the door

Songs + Stories + More from Hand2Mouth on the late side of the evening.

Hand2Mouth has been on the mini-raffle bandwagon for many a year now (a favorite memory of mine involves some dear friends winning the raffle gift of New Deal Vodka during a performance of Repeat After Me, way back in 2007! Let's just say, the bottle was near empty at the end of the show and yes, they liked both the performance and the drink).

As we get ready for our upcoming showings of Something's Got Ahold of My Heart we are also gathering goodies for more-than-mini April raffle of excellent items. There will of course be H2M swag (Sea Unicorn t-shirts!), sips from Widmer Bros Brewing, yoga class cards from The Peoples Yoga and Heart Fire Yoga, mugs and tees from our favorite coffee people Ristretto Roasters, and gift certificates from fabulous Kenton businesses including the Home Brew Exhange and Po'Shines (double double yum). All this plus more to come.

Get your art and your raffle on: April 20 & 21, 8pm at Disjecta. Wheeee!

Television play in 25 scenes. Unproduced in that medium; first performed in the season “Plays Television Would Not Do” at the RSC Warehouse Theatre, 21 February 1979. Directed by Barry Kyle; stage directions read by Terence Harvey. With Edward Jewesbury (Gildersleeve), Nicholas Le Prevost (Amber), Christopher Benjamin (Hacker), Roderick Smith (Clout), Charles Wegner (Tully), and others. Text in That Good Between Us/Credentials of a Sympathiser, London: John Calder, 1980, pp 61-98 (out-of-print, but may be available through amazon.com here).

“[Credentials of a Sympathiser's theme is] the relationship between the army and the ‘terrorists’ who oppose them at a time when the latter are in a position to negotiate terms. Written before the events leading to the birth of Zimbabwe, and at a time when increasing concern is felt over the rise of terrorism (or the aspiration for freedom and human rights) and the escalating powers of the guardians of authority, the play is topical and urgent in its relevance.”[1]

A disused hall is chosen as the site for cease-fire negotiations between government representative Gildersleeve and a group of terrorists. Government contractor Hacker (who also appears in The Love of a Good Man) is hired to clean the hall and provide catering for the negotiations; as he is cleaning the clerestory windows, he is mistakenly shot by a soldier and plummets through the window and to the floor to his death. This interrupts the negotiations only briefly; after they resume, they finally break off in acrimony. To his aide, Gildersleeve reveals that the government never planned to conclude a ceasefire at all; the meeting was only meant to identify those terrorist leaders who were wavering in their commitment and open to compromise, and this was accomplished.

Barker continues his ongoing examination of those who believe that their non-commitment to explicit political ideology is without its own politics. Hacker explains to his assistant Clout that “Terrorists may come and terrorists may go, but conferences will last forever. And the issuing of contracts to the likes of us” (81); but this does not relieve him of his status as the “sympathiser” of the title.

Rabey (pp 63-66) discusses the teleplay in detail, concluding:

The limitations of Credentials, and of the early plays, are their comparative restriction of imaginative interest to engagement with those who pride themselves intellectually on running the game — or, more precisely, believe themselves to be running the game (Gildersleeve is comparatively rare … in that he really is running the game of power as defined within the world of the play, making that world quite hermetically sealed). Credentials demonstrates how much of the action of the play and the society takes place over the head of Miller [the soldier who shoots Hacker and stoically maintains his innocence in that he provided fair warning and went by the rulebook] and his kind; it is not until Barker’s portrayal of Ball in Victory that we encounter a full imaginative engagement with his position. (66)

Footnotes

1. Jacket copy of the John Calder edition.

One of the best things about Seattle as a theatre town is that it’s small enough that you can get your arms around it.  If you care to, you can get to know pretty much everyone who is active here as an artist.  For instance, I have met Yussef el Guindi, chatted and corresponded with him, and very much enjoyed the interaction.  But thanks to Vincent Delaney’s interview of Yussef over at HowlRound, I feel like I know him so much better, and admire him all the more for it.  His thoughts on the new works scene in Seattle are fervent and hopeful without indulging in the “best-of-all-possible-cities” Pollyannaism that some successful playwrights and artistic administrators like to espouse publically here.*

I . . . wish artistic directors were as brave as their audiences. I think audiences are much more adventurous than some artistic directors imagine. . . .

What’s surprising to me is that you’d think the Seattle theater scene would be more open to riskier choices, in terms of choosing plays that are a little edgier, even more political. Seattle being, for the most part, a liberal city, you’d think that would be reflected in the plays selected. But perhaps more than being liberal or progressive, Seattle is also known for being very civil. We are a polite town. That politeness gene, I sense, seems to influence the selection of plays, as much as anything else. But then I’ve always felt theaters in general are inherently conservative, especially the big LORT houses. . . .

Thanks, Yussef, for energizing and inspiring me to keep working for world class.  You being here gets us so much closer.

 

* Note to said colleagues: singing desperate paeans to perfection is a particularly pernicious form of despair.  We can only have hope when it’s possible for things to get better.

An audacious theatremaker has provided audiences with a tongue-in-cheek audio guide to someone else's production. Cue outrage

Forget the antics of Anonymous or LulzSec or even News International. For my money, the most audacious hacking in recent memory took place at a Montreal theatre last November. Local playwright Olivier Choinière held one of his occasional déambulatoires théâtrals – a kind of promenade theatre where the audience is directed around a public space while listening to an audio play on an MP3 player.

Instead of roaming the streets of Montreal, however, the audience for Choinière's Projet blanc – as this one-night event was called – found themselves being led to outside the city's classical theatre company, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM).

There, Choinière's audience members were furnished with second-balcony tickets to a production of Molière's The School of Wives and given top-secret instructions to hide their headphones and only put them back on once they were in their seats and the lights went down. When this audience hidden within the larger audience at the TNM pressed the right button at the appointed moment, they were treated to Choinière's wry, running commentary on the production they were watching – a monologue that revolved around the question of why we revive classics in the first place, and asked whether the director had really found the contemporary resonances in Molière's comedy that he claimed in the promotional materials.

Choinière – whose best-known play, Bliss, was presented in a translation by Caryl Churchill at London's Royal Court in 2008 – has dubbed what he executed a "hacking". The philosophy behind it: "to enter, to penetrate another cultural event without necessarily bothering or breaking or destroying." Indeed, Choinière's inaugural theatrical hacking flew under the radar at the time, completely unnoticed by the theatre's staff.

Since word got out, however, a debate over the ethics of Choinière's surreptitious infiltration of another artist's work has been raging. Like any high-profile hacker, the 38-year-old playwright provocateur is being held up as a hero by some, a villain by others. Irritated by what she sees as an aggressive act of disrespect, TNM's artistic director Lorraine Pintal has derided Choinière's work as "parasitical". (In private, she used even harsher language – accusing Choinière of perpetrating a kind of theatrical "rape".)

But an article last month in Montreal daily Le Devoir suggested that Choinière was following in the illustrious artist-as-hacker footsteps of Banksy, who famously smuggled a stuffed rat wearing sunglasses into London's Natural History Museum and hung his own artwork in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Of course, long ago, the theatre had a puckish proto-hacker in another Royal Court playwright, Joe Orton, who with his partner Kenneth Halliwell snuck books out of the library, then returned them with subversively altered dust jackets and blurbs. We can only imagine what Orton's sock puppet Edna Welthorpe would have got up to if s/he had had access to the internet. Personally, I find Choinière's theatrical adaptation of the art of hacking a pretty clever way of making a point – and, ultimately, not any more disruptive to the sacred space of theatre than, say, the current fad for "Tweet seats", reserved seating in which theatregoers are encouraged to post their responses to the play online.

In fact, my mind's been abuzz with ideas for how anarchic artists might secretly spirit audio overlays into all kinds of theatrical productions. And, perhaps, if newspapers do eventually die out, I might find a second career providing commentary tracks to accompany plays – the way US critic Roger Ebert has provided audio commentary for DVD releases of Citizen Kane and Casablanca.

In any case, I eagerly await to see what cultural event Choinière will hack next. And if the TNM remains angry, they should be creative in plotting revenge. As an online commenter on an article about the Canadian controversy recently suggested, why not organise a Molière flash mob to infiltrate one of Choinière's promenade pieces?