The latecomers policy at the Almeida is brilliant, for both latecomers and audience alike. Rather than shove you in at a random point and disturb everyone else, you’re given a sheet of paper the moment you walk in the door and plonked in front of a TV screen which relays what’s happening in the theatre. The paper briefs you on what has happened before you will enter the theatre so that you’re up to speed before being snuck in round the back. I was late – unavoidably, due to our joyous transport system – to Chimerica, but upon entering I was pretty up to speed with what was going on. It did mean, however, that I missed that opening image and was, like the figures in the play, given a symbol of the thing rather than the thing itself.

For the thing which strikes me most about Chimerica is precisely that: its use of symbols. Which, in a way akin to Mad Men, send us down all sort of tracks for consideration and possible outcomes. Considering the whole play stems from the idea that there’s a story behind the infamous Tiananmen Square photo taken in 1989, the rest of the play is built on the idea that images can mean everything, something and nothing simultaneously. Thus we see a floating red orbs, an unseen ghost and a load of plastic bags.

And though Joe Schofield (Stephen Cambell Moore, playing the man behind the photograph who attempts to discover Tank Man throughout the course of the play) hates it when people comment on the fact that his subject is holding plastic bags rather than the fact he’s a “hero”, it is these objects which act as our way in. For it’s not brands or screens or cash or lights which act as a symbol for hypercapitalism but bags. Plastic bags. Those things which we willingly take wherever we go, which we use to hold our purchases and which we reuse for carrying our own possessions elsewhere. As the second half of the show draws on, more and more bags are brought on stage, in the midst of public protests and in the privacy of home.

And, crucially, they are no different in China than in America. As both countries thrive on excess and antagonise one another with people in power who only serve their own citizens without thinking of wider global implications, the humble but damaging plastic bag remains constant. For all their market research and Chinese-ification of various American companies discussed in Tessa’s (Claudie Blakley) presentation, bags don’t change, carrying with them all the baggage of capitalism wherever they go.

I see the play itself, however, as less of a consideration of the relationship between China and America and more as a look at politics and the media at large which, like China and America, feed each other with their antagonism. How, though the media pretends to be holding those in power accountable, it really serves to perpetuate and support current structures of control, creating narratives and stories just like the political classes. The infamous Tank Man photo, for example, is used by many of the play’s characters to make a point of their own, either in support of or opposition to current trends. That act of defiance (or, indeed, of chance as Kirkwood suggests) can be used to bolster dozens of arguments.

And then, finally, it’s used as art in Schofield’s exhibition of his work. We see a handful of photographs of what could generally be termed “political” material, here presented in a gallery. When can the work the media creates be considered art? If we accept this as art, then can we suggest that political speeches are also, seeing as they do the same job of creating narratives through use of the imagination?

Alongside all this is a strand focussing on Zhang Lin (Benedict Wong), a friend of Joe living in China and struggling to make the ‘truth’ known about the Party’s control of the national consciousness. On American websites, he reads the “truth” about the smog in Beijing only to be told by the authorities that it is US agencies who make up the truth, not the Chinese government; the fact that we are uneasy about the idea that the West may be telling lies goes some way to proving Kirkwood’s point. And through flashbacks we slowly come to understand his motives for this struggle and his personal connection with the infamous photo, which he forces us to look at afresh (who is Tank Man? The man with the bags? Or the man in the tank?), thus crossing histories and memories until the two become mingled and inseparable.

In the author’s note, Kirkwood says that beyond the existence of the Tank Man photo(s), “everything [else] that transpires in the play is an imaginative leap”. The fact that I didn’t read this until after the watching the production and thus spent the entirety of its duration wondering to what extent the events were true is testament to Kirkwood’s skill as a dramatist. She, like her subjects, is creating an entire sprawling, complex, believable narrative from one single photo.

I realise that I’ve only spoken about the play so far and have barely mentioned Lyndsey Turner’s dazzling, clear production, which presents the text with a deftness and simplicity without taking away from its extraordinary complexity, but that’s probably down to the sheer scope of the text, which never shies away from being ambitious and raises a multitude of questions just on its own.

But yes, the production. What’s so perfect about it is the way in which Headlong’s trademark style enmeshes with the ambition of the text. The thing I’ve always admired about Headlong shows is their courage in not shying away from a slightly rough aesthetic, where we can see the seams and the workings of the set (see: Decade, Earthquakes in London). Naturally, this is born slightly out of necessity in putting these vast, far-reaching plays on stage, but it also seems to be making a clear point about a synthetic and a presentational environment which, when placed alongside the montage style, creates a sort of postmodern Brechtianism.

Es Devlin’s revolving cube design (reminiscent, as mentioned elsewhere, of Tom Scutt’s work on 13) is in thrall to this idea, containing within it three sets behind sliding walls which act as a multitude of locations, but which also create an eerie quality when simply lit from within (Tim Lutkin), as we peep behind the translucent screens to see ambiguous, anonymous bodies lost in history. Because sets have to be changed quickly as the set turns, we here encounter the roughness and DIY quality, as they never seem to be quite finished, instead acting merely as signifiers for a larger, more detailed world and in the process constantly reminding us that what we are watching is theatrical construction.

Then, in the set changes, we get projections from Finn Ross which both transport us across the globe and strengthen the points made about media manipulation and truth, as each is peppered with red lines and arrows used by photo editors to help them tell their stories. And Carolyn Downing’s buzzing soundtrack ensures the action is relentless.

The ensemble adds to this presentationalism, with (I think) all but three actors playing multiple roles and each clearly ‘performing’ without ever failing to be ‘truthful’. The trio at the heart of the play – Cambell Moore, Blakley and Wong – all go on clear, defined emotional journeys and each have extraordinary moments of emotional excess towards the end of the piece. Blakley also has a brilliant knack for making the rich starkness of Kirkwood’s language (“skipping down Broadway like some fucking cunt from a musical”, “congratulations. On your… tenacious… semen”) feel completely natural.

What Chimerica ultimately does is invite us to consider different ways of looking in an image-based information age which tries to structure narratives for us instead of allowing us to structure them ourselves. Though the China/America debate is present and allows the play to have contemporary resonance with its critique of hypercapitalism, it acts more as a background to the far more expansive issue of the media’s role in political life and vice versa. Like the themes discussed and the two eponymous countries, Kirkwood’s play and Turner’s production work both with and against each other to further shed light on these questions, acting as symbols themselves for a far bigger picture which has been clipped at the edges, so that what exists beyond the borders is always just out of reach.

Aakash Odedra’s Rising is made up of four completely separate solo dance pieces choreographed by four different practitioners which, though they make up a satisfying whole, ought to be considered separately. Though they all feature powerful lighting designs, emotive music and varying levels of engagement with Odedra’s background in Kathak, they each raise important questions as stand-alone pieces.

Nritta – Choreographed by Aakash Odedra

A contemporary take on classical Kathak, ‘Nritta’ has a semi-epic feel within the small space, as Odedra moves around with stunning fluidity. Limbs take on their own personas and seem to move entirely independently of the rest of the body, but they still all come together for moments of calm. Sometimes, it feels like there are other invisible people within the space to which the dance is struggling to reach out, but ultimately Odedra starts and finishes alone and praying in front of a searing light. Kathak seems to me to be both beautifully lyrical and crushingly violent, with the complexity of upper body movement contrasting brutally with the perpetual stamping of feet, stamping out a rhythm which may not even be there. What ‘Nritta’ does is set us up for the rest of the evening, as the semi-formalism of this take on Kathak is slowly eroded and Odedra becomes subsumed by the environment around him in later pieces.

In The Shadow Of Man – Choreographed by Akram Khan

At the beginning of this piece, a semi-naked, breathless figure heaves under a pulsing orange light. Slowly, it comes into focus but it’s still difficult to work out exactly how it’s contorted, as shifting shoulder blades look like grasping hands and the absence of arms puts us in mind of a chicken ready to be cooked. Slowly, like Frankenstein, he begins to teach himself how to move, emitting screams of pain and thumps of anger until he achieves the ability to travel freely. What’s extraordinary about this piece is its ability to create a narrative of struggle in the space of ten minutes, as the figure moves from pathetic and helpless to powerful and sturdy and back again. And though Khan suggests that this is a piece about humans as animals and vice versa, it seems to me to speak more about the slave trade, with the low glow of the lights and thumping music putting me in mind of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, considering not our connection with nature per se but the way in which humans have the terrifying capacity to turn each other into monsters.

CUT – Choreographed by Russell Maliphant

Here, after a short interval, Odedra takes us down a slightly more conceptual route as we encounter a piece which uses lighting to create a kind of dance around the one physically presented. Michael Hulls’ design consists of little more than a succession of thin, blueish shafts of light streaming through the haze, meaning the spinning and gliding extremities of Odedra’s body become the only things which are visible. For the first section, three lights appear in a horizontal line across the width of the stage, the body falling in and out of view as the shafts capture moments like photographs. Then, suddenly, about a dozen lights create a passageway running to the back of the stage, like moonlight is piercing through prison bars. The tone, however, is one of freedom, as Andy Cowton’s fast, rhythmic music puts us in mind of a steam train hurtling towards a new world, the flickering lights above making it look like Odedra is moving farther through space than he really is. An oppressive design thus takes on liberating meaning and the figure which was once glimpsed with a manic expression is now allowed freedom to roam.

Constellation – Choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

First up, ‘Constellation’ – running at about ten minutes – is one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced in a theatre. It’s no wonder this piece is left until last, as it left me both completely devastated and filled with verve. It begins with Odedra walking around the space, touching and swinging hanging lightbulbs as they begin to let off a low glow. Some bulbs swing in from nowhere and they even seem to dance independently, the world of this mini-cosmos becoming capable of action. After a spiritual, private dance to the tune of Olga Wojcieowska’s gentle piano score, he takes a bulb and pulls it, spinning it and gesturing towards other bulbs to turn them off as their light transfers to his until it is the only source of light, a piercing white giant in a blanket of dead stars. Then we get an excruciating, gasp-inducing moment as every bulb flashes bright white before an impenetrable darkness. The simplicity of the idea working alongside the complexity of Willy Cessa’s lighting design is what works so well in ‘Constellation’, as the lights perform a dance of their own and Odedra tries to tame them even though their extraordinary energy ends up overpowering him. It’s also the closest I think I’ve ever come to experiencing the sublime – in its purest sense – in a theatrical space, as my emotions seemed so completely disconnected from what I was thinking and it became hard to consider just why I found myself very near to breaking down at the end. Stunning.

*I’ve included some hyperlinks to excerpts of the dances, which give you an idea of what they’re doing but don’t nearly convey the beauty of Odedra’s work. It’s on in Edinburgh for a bit I think. Go and see it*

When I was in middle school studying Shakespeare for the first time, our English teacher used to organise a visit from a man called Anthony Glenn, who came along to create one-man versions of the Bard’s plays by getting us kids to play some of the characters and at certain moments getting the whole audience involved. They are some of my most vivid memories of those plays and I’m pretty sure they contributed fairly heftily to my ongoing obsession with Shakespeare in performance. And yesterday, as I sat on a chair and wielded guns whilst playing the roles of Anna and Hawkins in a recreation of the 1987 action film Predator, I was a child again, although this time the classic was of a rather different nature.

Andy Roberts’ show – the full title of which is Predator (Finishing off what I started when I was five) - is technically a solo affair. Yet the show begins with him sat on a chair holding up placards and asking us to read them out loud as a collective, ensuring that we are a part of events from the offset. Then, over the course of the next hour, he recreates the film, ostensibly still bitter about the fact that his brother stopped playing with him all those years ago. In order to get going, however, he needs three volunteers.

Now here’s a question for you. In a show like this, in which audience members are asked to get involved, is it okay for the guy with the press ticket to put his hand up? Should he experience the show from a unique perspective of someone inherently bound up in the performance, or should he instead view it like all the other audience members, detached and objective? And am I depriving someone of fun who has in fact paid to see the show?

All these questions sprang to mind as I decided whether or not to raise my hand when Roberts asked for volunteers, before I reached the conclusion that actually it was okay. I would still be experiencing the show as an audience member, unaware what was going to happen next and remaining at the whim of Roberts.

So I undoubtedly have a very particular understanding of the show. I don’t have a clue what it looks like from the actual audience or whether it works for the majority of people in the room. I do know, however, that I had a hell of a lot of fun.

I’ve only ever seen bits of the film Predator, but Roberts is so clear in his passion that you get swept up with the whole thing, shouting lines from the film and throwing army figures across the studio. In fact, by creating the story I now feel I know it far better than I if I’d simply watched the film, as narrative-making causes ownership.

But Predator isn’t simply an all-guns-blazing, silly, playful take on an action film. Roberts’ brother is conspicuous by his absence, mentioned throughout and even heard at one point, but never directly involved. Yet it is his refusal to continue playing which has apparently been the cause of the show’s creation; if he hadn’t given up, we wouldn’t have this experience.

It is, therefore, a hymn to play and childhood, but also raises questions about sharing, participation and storytelling. I have no idea whether or not the show is as enjoyable if simply sitting in the audience, but I can say for sure that from where I was sitting, standing and playing it filled me with an unshakeable childish glee.

I first experienced Daniel Bye’s The Price of Everything via the Northern Stage at St Stephens live stream during the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Rather than trek for an hour across the city early(ish) in the morning and pay a tenner to sit in a small dark room drinking milk, I instead sat in my own small dark room drinking coffee and watching the show for free. I know I enjoyed the piece because I’ve been talking about it all year and using it as a reference point for some of my own projects, but for some reason I didn’t write about it. And now, after rewatching it live at Warwick Arts Centre as part of the (L)one Festival and chatting to Bye as part of a pre-show discussion, it feels as good a time as any to have a bit of a think about it.

The Price of Everything is marketed as a “performance lecture”, which I’m told was decided upon in order to give the show a sense of “mock-seriousness” and fool an audience into thinking they’re going to be watching some “high-art” when in fact the show is anything but impenetrable in the way we may expect “high-art” to be. Indeed, it’s only really the first half of the show which resembles anything like a lecture at all, with the latter portion becoming far more simply a piece of storytelling. By telling us stories, jokes and anecdotes about the relationship between price and value, Bye asks us to take on a “naive and reckless optimism” in order to situate ourselves in opposition to structures which encourage us to be cynical, guarded and selfish.

The use of the word “Price” in the title goes some way to explaining Bye’s anger (and anger is definitely the word considering the passion with which he speaks in the show) at the commodification of everyday life, where whatever we come into contact with is given a “price” which has nothing – or very little – to do with its “value”. We happily interchange the two words without thinking that they hold completely different meanings, and are encouraged to believe that those things with a high “value” must be given a high “price” (see: university education etc). We are also reminded of Lord Darlington’s profession that a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing” (Lady Windermere’s Fan), and in this case the omission of the second clause suggests that the idea that things actually have value is slowly being eroded away from our cultural consciousness.

It also nicely sets up the opening section of the show, during which Bye takes us through – with slides – the cost of a human body if we were to exchange each individual body part. It amounts to a silly figure which I can’t quite remember, but serves to highlight the absurdity of putting a price on certain things: though selling our bodies off would make a hell of a lot of money and makes perfect sense financially, we wouldn’t ever do a thing because we value our lives more than that.

Throughout this whole section, Bye pours each audience member a small glass of milk amounting to seventeen pence, which is the amount each tax-paying citizen pays towards the arts each week. We are then invited to go up and collect a glass each, and all Bye wants in return is a smile and a “thank you”. It’s a small gesture which serves to underline the stupidity and short-sightedness behind any reasoning to cut arts budgets, and nicely acts as a big “fuck you” to that late milk-snatcher of the 1980s. But there was also a part of me which didn’t want to take the milk; if the contents of that glass can go to the arts, why should I take some milk which I don’t need? Which goes to prove Bye’s suggestion that we cannot separate price and value.

This act of walking to the stage also makes us implicit in the piece and underlines simply a running theme of the show which asks us to become active in a struggle against late capitalism from within its own structures. By spreading kindness and  forcing us to be active within the confines of the theatrical space, Bye offers the possibility for this happening outside the studio’s walls, convincing us in the process that a better, kinder, more selfless alternative is possible (interestingly, I felt far more galvanised to go out and act after experiencing the show live than when sat slobbing on a sofa last year, which I guess goes to show the importance of acknowledging an audience).

In order to convince us of this, The Price of Everything is full of stories. Stories about the time when Bye sold an air guitar for an obscene amount of money on eBay. Stories about buying the coffee for the person behind you in the queue and the chain continuing for hours. Stories about creating a community-based, value-driven utopia on a high-street which blossomed from the humble beginning of a free milk bar. They begin as believable but snowball into idealised narratives, therefore bringing into doubt the verisimilitude of the previous tales whilst forcing us to consider the structures of those we’ll be told later. Is Bye being unethical by not conveying truth? Or is he offering us hope? I never once felt duped or led astray throughout the hour and instead felt that the fictions strengthened my resolve to do something. It’s just struck me that even the facts and figures given at the beginning may well have been doctored, but funnily enough this doesn’t in any way diminish the point. When politicians and the media lie to us every day why should I feel angry when in a theatre – a place where I go to experience something which isn’t real – stories are told to make a point?

Bye’s performance style also feeds into this point. Bye told me that the reason for bringing director Dick Bonham into the mix was to make sure he “wasn’t acting”, but there’s actually a clear presentational aspect to his performance style, and it lies halfway between “acting” and “not acting”. There are marks he clearly has to hit and he undoubtedly follows a script (with a few ad-libs here and there). And he also wears the same clothes for every performance. Which means that, though the text is written in Bye’s own voice, with digressions that sound like digressions and jokes which feel organic, a character of sorts is very clearly being played.

I’ve spent the past weekend trying to consider the ways in which these notes about form and performance tie into Bye’s points about value and positive action but have struggled to come to any kind of conclusion which isn’t tenuous or far-fetched. The best I can really do is agree with Bye’s suggestion that the “mock-seriousness” allows us to situate the show – and by extension, the debate – within a slightly different framework, demonstrating that it’s a lot easier than it looks to individually become kinder people. All we have to do to fight the pervasive cynicism caused by current structures is to perform a slightly different role, to tell a few stories and to partake in random acts of kindness.

At the beginning of Pirates of the Carabina’s Flown, a performer asks if anyone from the audience has “any experience of climbing”. There’s an awkward pause followed by a child raising his hand. After said boy is let down gently, a gentleman puts up his arm sheepishly. He finds his way onto the stage and is led off to get kitted up. About ten minutes later, after some impressive ring routines, he returns to help a woman with her flying act, but accidentally rockets too fast up the ladder, causing her to hurtle into a low-hung lighting rig. It’s pretty funny, but in that moment, the illusion is shattered; of course they wouldn’t let a member of the public anywhere near this stuff.

This moment pretty much sums up Flown, a piece sold as circus theatre with a twist: there are plenty of smart ideas and some mind-boggling routines, but they are only pushed to a certain point before being abandoned, the initial impetus suspended in the air like our performers.

Perhaps this is unfair. The company never profess to be interrogating the nature of performance or opening up circus to wider possibilities, but when there is a hint at something more than circus it’s frustrating it doesn’t go further. Early on in the seventy-minute show, various performers tell crap jokes into a microphone, and elsewhere monologues examine the various histories of the cast and how their failure pursuing one career led them there. The funniest routine (which also turns out to be the most visually compelling) sees some aerial ribbon work go horribly wrong. The theme of failure comes up time and time again, and there are even echoes of Forced Entertainment at times, but these strands often feel only half thought through and don’t ever really entwine with the circus trickery itself.

That said, when we are watching simply a circus routine to the sound of some soulful music, it’s hard not to enjoy the show. The live music is always chosen intelligently, leading up to a hard-metal finale, and the choreography itself has an enchanting quality to it. There’s also been some clear thought put into the aesthetic which, though dominated through necessity by a metal rig, features circles throughout, hinting towards a repetitive, ongoing bond these performers have with their show and their art.

On a wider level, Flown also got me thinking about circus in theatre. It’s a tradition which was made famous by Brook’s Dream, but I’ve never seen the two forms mingle that well. Granted, I’ve only experienced a handful of shows which would describe themselves as ‘circus theatre’ but there’s always been a large focus on the acrobatics themselves rather than any themes or narratives on which the aerial work can shed light. I wonder whether this is down to the fact that if any large-scale acrobatics is going to take place then certain rigs and pieces of equipment have to be in place, meaning that a particular aesthetic must be employed which may impact upon other choices. It’s also true that their forms and styles are rather different, and I guess it’s hard to use circus techniques without people thinking “That’s like the circus,” which is pretty useless if you’re trying to comment on characters’ emotions or their environment. Which is a shame, because I think a proper mingling of the two would be extraordinary and one step closer to a total theatre. But as I said, I probably just haven’t seen good examples and there are inevitably shows out there which do both. I just wish Flown had gone that little bit further.

The Seagull: a play which, when first produced, was extraordinarily radical, shifting paradigms around direction and form, but which due to the passage of time has lost some of its raw energy, so that now it’s fairly easy to view it as a conventional play. For all of Konstantin’s ranting about breaking the rules and changing the structure, in 2013 the text itself can often feel like it fails to be different.

Which is perhaps the main reason why Blanche McIntyre’s production for Headlong is so successful. By setting the piece on a blank, neutral, fairly sparse stage with a somewhat (and I hesitate to use the word as there’s a joke about it in John Donnelly’s adaptation) ‘Germanic’ feel to it, so that with just a few strong visual gestures and sharp performances, a whole new life is breathed into the play and we recognise that its arguments about the purpose of art, creation and the imagination are just as, if not more, important now than ever before.

When it comes to these arguments which at a very basic level pit Konstantin and Trigorin against each other, my sympathies have always been – perhaps unsurprisingly – with the former, despite the fact he’s a bit of a wanker (or maybe because he’s a bit of a wanker). And though I know that Chekhov is ridiculing – or at the very least questioning – Konstantin during the following speech, I find it hard not to get emotional about it:

“We’re sleepwalking into oblivion! We need to wake up. And it’s not going to happen with the old theatre. That’s why we have to tear it down”

And what’s I loved so much about this production is that it pretty much manages to theatricalise this sentiment, proving it to be a truism (though, as Andrew Haydon has pointed out, it could have gone further) without ever taking away from the debate the play presents.

Laura Hopkins’ set consists of two important central features. In the middle, the much-discussed enlarged see-saw, which begins jutting out into the wings before being pulled across on its hinge to become a pivoting platform. Characters stand or sit on either side, the argument hanging in the balance, before one can take it no more and strides to the other side as it falls with a thud. At the beginning of the second act we are in another configuration again so that the platform juts out towards the audience, evoking a pier over the lake, splitting duos in two and experiencing within ten minutes a son disowning his mother and a furious wank. Finally, during the climax, it’s simply a dinner table.

The other crucial aspect of Hopkins’ design is the canvas-coloured and slightly dirtied back wall, which acts as a notebook for our characters. For the first scene, it stays clean, but very quickly it becomes a key method of creating atmosphere, as in the first scene change two actors enter with spray bottles (presumably filled with water) and create a simple landscape with hills and birds. Throughout the next scene, it slowly fades, turning into little more than a memory. More images and words are built up throughout the play, building up into a frenzy of phrases and forgotten ideas towards its end.

What this all does is to create a fairly blank slate onto which McIntyre can paint her pictures, taking the majority of Chekhov’s symbols and wiping them clean so she and her team can build up again from scratch, adding to this production’s musings on creativity and the imagination, which ordinarily begin from nothing but very quickly become messy and complex.

In fact, the only real physical, visual symbol from the original text is the seagull itself. Which, I only properly clocked the other day, isn’t even a fucking seagull. Which then underlines the choice this production has made to very clearly be a comedy. A dark comedy, true, but a comedy nonetheless. In Donnelly’s script, each character takes him or herself extremely seriously, completely oblivious to the world around them and what they’re saying. And then delivered with earnest sincerity by the cast, who ramp the comedy levels up to high. There were various times which I sat violently convulsing in my seat, surrounded by less-than-impressed audience members.

And just as Chekhov changed the way in which his audiences watched theatre, McIntyre also asks us to be perpetually aware of levels of performance. Throughout, Donnelly has inserted asides and soliloquies to the audience not necessarily so they can express themselves but so they can verbalise ideas integral to an understanding of the play. During these moments, the house lights fade up so that spectator and performer can see one another more clearly. Then, for a good period of time in the second act, we are completely blocked off by a series of criss-crossed wires covering the front of the stage in order to create an invisible fourth wall. Some brilliant lighting from Guy Hoare comes only from on stage, so that the barrier often breached by lights in the stalls is kept up. Then, minutes later, they are torn down as Nina returns near the end of the play, entering through a fire exit in the stalls; here, she is one of us, interrupting and changing the course of the play from the auditorium.

The performances all carefully walk this line between self-aware and completely absorbed in the play, with Alexander Cobb’s Konstantin remaining knowing of his status as a character and Pearl Chanda’s Nina on the other end of the spectrum. This tension runs throughout, always bubbling beneath the surface in order to expose Chekhov’s contemplation of the self in an increasingly individualised world. Then, opposite them, are two members of the older generation, Trigorin and Arkadina (Gyuri Sarossy and Abigail Cruttenden), who both meet somewhere in the middle, aware only to themselves and each other but not necessarily happier for it as they end up engaging in a bit of masturbation by the lake.

I realise I haven’t really written anything about what this production of The Seagull says about the characters and their situations, but then my lasting impression is one of a series of images intimately connected to the ideas they present. There’s not much that can be said about the plot of Chekhov’s play which hasn’t been said before so it feels far more useful to talk about McIntyre’s aesthetic, which here finds a fragment of the radicalism which the play has lost over the past century.

*Originally written for Exeunt*

On a day when the morning papers all showed images and descriptions of bloodied, violent acts, the RSC’s new production of Titus Andronicus speaks clearly to a society which has a close relationship to violence. This is a play which demonstrates clearly the absurdity behind the eternal truth of violence begetting violence, and has become popular in recent years due to its ability to be simultaneously comic and tragedy, plugging into a cultural psyche which finds it impossible to consider human experience within the confines of simple labels.

In his début at the company, Michael Fentiman directs with a keen flair for imagery, meaning his production sears the pictures created by Shakespeare’s text onto the back of your retinas. Each picture has been clearly thought out on this elaborate, tiled set (Colin Richmond), lit sumptuously at every level by Chris Davey so that when the norm of symmetry is broken, its rupture becomes all the more apparent. I’ve not seen a director use the Swan space so effectively to make meaning out of visual cues (I almost squealed at one point when it seemed that iconic image from Three Kingdoms was being referenced).

Unfortunately, though Fentiman succeeds in his creation of visuals, a lack of pace – especially before the interval – means the potential for a charge towards the ending is never realised and for a play in which so much happens, there is rather a lot of stasis. It seems this lack of congruity is partly what Fentiman is aiming to achieve – as typified by Richmond’s ahistorical costumes – but though this is a theory which works on paper, this production doesn’t quite go far enough in its extremes to make that particular choice pay off.

This is embodied by the ensemble, who at times come close to genius but elsewhere don’t quite grasp the veracity with which Shakespeare writes. Chiron and Demetrius (Jonny Weldon and Perry Millward), for example, are here neither frustrating, comic adolescents nor gruesome young men, whilst Richard Durden’s Marcus doesn’t quite fit within the world Fentiman presents. Conversely, Stephen Boxer’s Titus is one of brute power coupled with a sharp wit and Katy Stephens is a fierce but careful Tamora, who terrifies in her scene with Rose Reynolds’ Lavinia, showing absolutely no remorse, before the latter is carried off only to return with stumps wrapped in her own hair. Kevin Harvey’s tall, imposing Aaron, however, is found at the centre of all our stories both literally and figuratively, in a performance which is somehow both nuanced and brutal.

Though we experience gore and pain during the first act, there is crucially little of the red stuff until the final few scenes of the play, ensuring we never become desensitised to violence and allowing for an extraordinary, blackly comic banquet scene in which the company see how much they can make those opposites of comedy and tragedy truly work against each other. It’s a smart piece of stagecraft which underlines this production’s suggestion that young people will only copy the violence of their elders, but I couldn’t help feeling it was somehow unearned and retrospectively left the rest of the play seem disengaged by comparison.

Big actions change the course of history. But as those of us with an interest in theatre know, so too can words. And though theatre is probably seen as the lesser cousin to the big speech in terms of political debate, there is no doubt an inherant theatricality in speechifying. The People (i.e. the audience) watch or listen to The Politician (i.e. the performer) and within that time they are either won or lost. Recently, a tutor of mine suggested that all speeches in Shakespeare could essentially be boiled down to one person persuading someone else. And it’s not much different in all the other places we look.

In BigMouth, SKaGeN theatre from Belgium have created something which speaks to the small scale of the theatre auditorium and the large scale of historical world events. For seventy minutes, performer Valentijn Dhaenens takes us through a variety of important speeches, switching between languages, characters and periods as we come to realise that, since the dawn of time, people have always used rhetoric and performance in order to try and get them to believe in the idea they want to get across.

We start off with a darkened, backlit figure, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, which acts as a way in: the speech is in Dutch, recanted in low tones and seems to have little to say to us, but we learn that to get the full impact we need to focus on how it’s said and in what context. Though translated words appear on the screen above, more can be gained by just experiencing the speech, taking in the mood which has been set and going with it, concentrating on the rhythms and cadences of Dhaenens’ voice.

This is an idea which runs throughout, exemplifying the way in which context changes meaning. Though there is no way of making this small audience genuinely feel like they are anticipating the end of the Second World War or the hedonism of the 90s, music can prime us to feel in something similar. In the above two cases, renditions of We’ll Meet Again and Smells Like Teen Spirit are used to change the tone after the previous speech, thus stirring up emotions which would otherwise be difficult to conjure and demonstrating that words in songs are just as integral to understanding particular Zeitgeists. Dhaenens and his sound designers use live looping (see: Shlomo, but with less beatboxing) in order to build up a sound, leading to full and textured aural moments before the solitude and simplicity of one man talking.

The choice of speeches is also smart, with Aristotle’s plea and Pericles’ speech to his troops featuring early on, setting baselines for the use of rhetoric and its functions. Dhaenens has also been careful not simply to mimic the timbre of the speakers, so that Goebbels’ famous Totaler Krieg speech, originally shouted in a high-pitched rage, is here a softly spoken, kind and warming piece of oratory, subjecting us to the terrifying but subtle ways politicians get the citizens on their side.

As BigMouth progresses, we move away from the seemingly petty problems of Europe to look at America, which is introduced by way of a quickfire round of Bush I, the Kennedys, Reagan, Martin Luther King and Muhammed Ali to the tune of Bernstein and Sondheim’s America. Here, Dhaenens’ delivery becomes less considered and more arrogant, as the shorter, more direct phrasing of these speeches comes to light. Embedded within them is a quiet 1996 polemic from Osama Bin Laden on the dangers of American imperialism (edited from an interview), which astonishingly comes across as one of the most considered, honest and – well – sensible of the night. Bush II follows, with all his outrageous homophobia, brash remarks and moronic musings.

Those we may expect in the show – Hitler, Churchill, Blair – are conspicuous by their absence; some of the most memorable orations speak to us even when they’re not there. What we have instead is a kind of alternative history, as the official story which we are subjected to is subverted and challenged.

Nothing is taken too seriously, either, and beneath the surface throughout is a sharp sense of humour and an acute understanding of the contract between Dhaenens and his audience, as we float in a somewhat unreal space without knowing quite what our role is here. We thus become the unknowing, largely demeaned citizen, subject only to what this speaker in front of us says at the same time as remaining a critical, engaged audience member, aware that the tricks being used here of editing, emphasis and context are just the same as the ones employed by politicians and the media around them. We never really know whether to sit in awe or run in fright, meaning we’re probably not much different from those speakers’ original audiences.

*Originally written for Exeunt*

There’s something fitting about the fact that Will Adamsdale’s The Victorian in the Wall, a play which considers, amongst other things, property, middle class-values and the past, is the last play Dominic Cooke scheduled to be produced at the Royal Court, programmed jointly with incoming artistic director Vicky Featherstone. It acts like a Clybourne Park in reverse, a Pain and the Itch gone wrong, or a Jerusalem without the anti-hero. And here’s the thing: it’s all the better for it.

For unlike those structured, verbose pieces, Adamsdale’s play (presented in collaboration with Fuel) is imbued with a real sense of play (in the programme, we are told that the process was a mix between “devised and written”, thus proving that the two are not “mutually exclusive”). The makeshift, lo-fi presentation of the text mingles smoothly with the almost revolutionary ending, completely turning on its head the nostalgic way in which Clybourne Park thought about property and the past.

At first, it seems that the play isn’t going to do much more than skewer middle-class values; Guy and his girlfriend Fi are planning on getting a knock-through, though she’s going away for a week to do some work in the “third-sector” so has to leave him in charge. He’s a self-confessed “lazy, middle-class writer” and it rather seems we won’t get much more than a gentle ribbing about being relatively well-off  and the problems which arise when doing work on a house. That is, of course, right up until the moment when Guy finds a Victorian in his wall.

From this moment on, we are in an absurd, somewhat unreal space, as Mr Elms (the Victorian, played with staid emotion by Matthew Steer) recounts his story of a love affair with a music hall star when he lived in the house. This plays out alongside Guy’s doomed attempts to Get Things Done, which ultimately fail due to having to look after the new occupants (around halfway through, the pair become a trio as a man Guy “adopted”, Fortunately Maybe, comes knocking). Rather than giving him a new appreciation of the world around him, however, the presence of his new friends causes him to fall deeper into a reverie.

There is a not oblique suggestion here that we are once again living in an era of Victorian values and divides, but Adamsdale goes deeper than this by contemplating how we place property in relation to time, allowing both time periods to play out simultaneously in a way which gently parodies Stoppard’s Arcadia. References to pop culture (specifically The Wire) are littered throughout, and the way in which lots of clues to the conclusion are placed throughout only to become damned useful later on is clearly a joke made at the expense of the well-made play.

The real success of The Victorian in the Wall, however, lies in its utterly joyous, aurally inventive production, co-directed by Adamsdale and Lyndsey Turner, which moves from scene to scene swiftly and is punctuated by Chris Branch’s silly songs. Michael Vale’s design, complete with dozens of boxes, gives only a blueprint of the house, which means the five performers have a blank space in which to work, emphasising the absurdity of the piece. I’ve always found Adamsdale’s innocence and energy in performance perpetually fascinating, and his work here is no different.

There’s no doubt that the piece appeals to a particular sense of humour, one which can keep up with the cultural allusions and subtle joking occurring throughout, but when you’re guffawing every few minutes the charm is nigh-on impossible to resist. The Victorian in the Wall also ends in a way which I’m sure has some resonances for Featherstone; as everything goes completely tits-up and it seems like Guy’s world is about to literally and metaphorically collapse around him, Adamsdale posits the completely revolutionary idea that sometimes, if we want to move forward, we have to start completely afresh. To get rid of old ghosts, therefore, we may have to do a few knock-throughs.

In the opening moments of David Farr’s production of Hamlet, currently playing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Jonathan Slinger’s Dane takes up position centre stage, ostensibly in the middle of a fencing hall. In his hands he holds a small wooden sword, and as he hears a noise offstage, the first line of the play – ordinarily Barnado’s – is spoken by him: “Who’s there?”

“It’s an old space that relates very strongly to my father,” Slinger tells me as we sit down for a chat before the show, juggling personal pronouns so that he often speaks for his character, “so it’s a very emotional space for me”. The whole of this production rests on the fact that we understand very early on the grief Hamlet feels for his father, and for Slinger it was important to get this right: “You have one scene to tell us what the story of that is. But because the ghost is very often portrayed as a very terrifying spectacle from another world that appears to be quite threatening and quite angry, that gets in the way of what I think we need to see, which is quite an intimate portrait of the relationship that was.”

One of the most powerful moments of the production comes when Hamlet reaches out and touches the ghost’s hand when he meets him on the battlements. A piercing, elongated scream of “Oh God” echoes through the auditorium. The decision to do this was a no-brainer: “We need to empathise with the beauty and the intimacy and the love and the vulnerability of what used to be there. And we need to completely empathise with what’s Hamlet’s lost [...] Without that, I don’t really understand why Hamlet is doing what he’s doing or feels the way he feels.”

Slinger had been “talking to Michael Boyd about doing Hamlet for quite a few years”, but after the old artistic director announced he was resigning, the chance came up to tackle the play with Farr. The two initially worked together during the RSC’s 50th anniversary season on Pinter’sThe Homecoming, and have subsequently created memorable performances of Malvolio and Prospero, so the progression to Hamlet felt right. “There’s something – probably to do with the fact that David and I are a very similar age – that means we feel very much like equals. It feels like a very equal relationship. I think when I work with David it’s the most purely collaborative experience, because the avuncular, almost paternal feeling that there normally is with a director isn’t there with David.”

The show has just returned from a short hiatus (during which time Maria Aberg’s stonking production of As You Like It got up and running) which, according to Slinger, was much needed: “I have never been more tired than when I was when we were opening this show. There were nights when I’d go home and I’d be so exhausted that I would be very concerned for my health and wellbeing the next day”. You wouldn’t guess it, however, from Slinger’s sprightly conversation, which flits from one anecdote to the next with extraordinary energy. Two years ago, he admitted that Macbeth was the hardest role he’d played, and even though this role is “emotionally and physically challenging”, the Scottish king still remains the most difficult role he’s come across because, he says, “it took longer to connect with him as a person.” Though exhausting, he can “engage with Hamlet as a person more easily. There’s an outsider quality to Hamlet which I personally connect with.”

One of the joys for any actor playing Hamlet is his relationship with an audience which, especially in a space such as the thrust set-up at the RST, “is key”. When the Globe first opened, Slinger tells me, a production of The Winter’s Tale (in which he played Florizel) demonstrated to him the power of Shakespeare’s “call and response” in his speeches. When Mark Lewis Jones’ Leontes asked “Shall I live on to see this bastard kneel / And call me father?”, a loud cry of “Yes!” came from the audience, with a scream of “No” following “Better burn it now / Than curse it then”, allowing for the concluding line of “But be it; let it live” to come entirely from the audience’s will. At this moment, Slinger says, he remembers thinking “Fucking hell. He wrote it – he absolutely 100% wrote it, without question of a doubt wrote it – with that in mind.” From this moment on, he understood that many speeches and soliloquies are “direct conversations with the audience”, which was crucial to the rehearsal process for Hamlet.

In rehearsals, the plan was originally to have direct interaction with the audience, with Slinger coming to sit in the audience to speak “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I?” Away from an audience, “it worked brilliantly,” but as soon as it was tried in front of members of the public, “it didn’t work at all.” Like the best actors, Slinger balances instinct and intellect, though it’s easy to hear the disappointment in his voice when he tells me this instinctive idea of his didn’t work: “Maybe it’s partly to do with the fact that if you go and sit in the audience you’re not quite as visible as in a rehearsal room, where you’re just literally walking to the sides. I don’t know. It was very odd. I was really disappointed to begin with. It was such a brilliant idea and it worked so fantastically in the rehearsal room, we thought ‘This is going to be amazing’. And it just fell flat.”

I was going to ask Slinger whether or not he’d started preparing for All’s Well That Ends Well, in which he’s set to play Parolles, but a script on the table answers this question for me. Rehearsals started this week, and he’s looking forward to playing a character which goes completely against his Hamlet, seeing as “Paroles is traditionally more of a comic creation. It’ll be nice to have the contrast: the dark, melancholy depression of Hamlet and something a bit lighter.”

My final question is the standard “What next?”, which has the potential to lead to general answers and protests describing the unknown, but again this is clearly something Slinger has been thinking about for a while: “because you’re always playing these big characters on big stages, it could be argued that all I’m doing is exercising certain big muscles.” It’s definitely true that Slinger has found something he’s good at within the confines of the RSC, so it’s no surprise that he thinks he needs “to go on and do something completely different now. Either do more modern stuff in a small studio space somewhere or go off and do some very forensic small stuff on screen.” A pause, and then an answer which suggests that may be easier said than done: “That’s probably what I should do”.

But for all Slinger’s suggestions that he feels a need to move away from Shakespeare, it can’t be denied that this is where his heart lies. When I suggest the possibility of Shakespeare on film, his eyes light up and says he would relish the opportunity to not think so technically when performing seeing as there’s “a mic that’s picking up every whisper so you can really afford to take things down.” Ultimately, however, there’s no doubt he’ll be back on this stage in the future, maybe even playing his ideal pairing of Iago and Benedick in one season: “That would be very interesting.” And with such a perpetually intriguing and nuanced back catalogue, it’s hard not to agree.