Complicity and Inertia

It always feels somewhat contrived and hubristic to try and find running themes within the shows selected each year for NSDF. As we are told many times, there is no curation that takes place on the part of the selectors and so any running ideas that emerge are purely coincidental. It doesn’t take too much of a leap, however, to suggest that the questions being asked by shows at the festival are representative of those being asked by student theatre as a whole.

Two major themes stuck out this year; complicity and inertia, with most shows demonstrating some kind of appreciation for one or the other with a couple of crossovers.

Com·plic·i·ty

n. Involvement as an accomplice in a questionable act.

“Facehunters”

The pre-set of Facehunters is one of the best I’ve ever seen. I’m a sucker for flashing lights and loud music in theatre (maybe because I don’t go clubbing that much in real life), and as we walk into the Clive Wolfe auditorium for the final show of the festival, we are met with both those things. Pulsating music booms through the speakers, and spotlights circle around the space before the band kick in for our first loud, angry song, shouting imperatives at us: ‘Take my fucking picture’. Sitting in the front row, we are up close and personal with the performers, hearing their voices both raw and through the speakers. Images created by bodies and dancers flash up in front of us before snapping into oblivion. The production is at its strongest when sticking to creating a spectacle, even though the plot and dialogue are often far from perfect.

Graham Mercer’s musical follows a few nights (and mornings-after) in the lives of Katherine, Lily, Sam and Sweetie, all of whom are self-prescribed ‘hipsters’.

Age on Stage

Charlie Steele: I’ve often heard the term ‘bunch of students playing old people’ bandied about negatively, and never more so than this particular week. Basically all of the shows, including the devised pieces, contain instances of students playing characters often several decades older than them, with varying degrees of success. From a performer’s perspective, I understand the reasons why. There are so few great roles for people of our age group. When you’re young and passionate about theatre it can be hard to find a play that reflects you unless you’re writing your own work, and even then, is anyone really interested in that perspective? And would you want to limit yourself to ‘writing what you know’? For me, theatre is special in that it allows us to suspend our disbelief more than any other art form. To me, I don’t know if the form matters that much if it’s executed well.

Dan Hutton: There’s an interesting gulf between the way in which responses to this question have varied between naturalistic and non-naturalistic pieces

“The Babysitter” by Breman Rajkumar

Breman Rajkumar’s The Babysitter is a 100-minute romp, with a plethora of fantastic comic moments and a warm heart. Nikki, in her late teens, is angry about the way in which her parents treat her and her sister Ri, who suffers from epilepsy, believing them to be overly protective. Though middle-class parents Jay and Sara have hired Aaron to take care of their children, Nikki does all she can to get him fired, believing herself to be the better candidate for the job as she teeters on the cliff of inertia experienced by many young people.

Rajkumar’s text is well structured (though Act 3 is largely redundant) and smoothly shifts between comic, dramatic and metatheatrically farcical. It gives a incisive critique of middle-class parenting, though there are some problematic representations of gender, politics and a silly decision to include mention of a kid’s TV show character called ‘Pete Dough’ (Paedo! Geddit!?).

Strong performances are given by Angus Imrie and Katie Caddick as Aaron and Nikki, who have a tangible intellectual chemistry and each manages to charm us in their own way. The evening, however, belongs to Thisakya Gunasekera, in her extraordinarily intelligent portrayal of ten-year old Ri. Her comic timing is spot on, and she remains utterly captivating from beginning to end.

On occasion, Rajkumar’s production runs close to sentimentality, but the sharpness of the comedy allows us to forgive this. The Babysitter is a strong, tight production, though there are too many holes in the text to make it flawless.

“God of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza

At the back of the stage in York Drama Society’s production of God of Carnage is a chest, upon which sits a chic hourglass, full of red sand and slowly ticking away time throughout the course of the play. In Rory McGregor’s production, it demonstrates the inevitability of the final dénouement, but while the sand falls into the bottom chamber consistently, the performances on show feel far less subtle, managing to land a handful of jokes, but ultimately making the play into a cartoon rather than a satire on modern middle-class life.

Having now seen four productions of this play over the course of as many years, I can comfortably say that the comedy in Reza’s play does not benefit from multiple viewings.

“Jerusalem” by Jez Butterworth

From the moment Peter Bradley’s production of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem opens with an instrumental of Hubert Parry’s hymn of the same name, it ensures it departs from Ian Rickson’s ‘classic’ 2009 production. Nottingham New Theatre instantly put their own mark on the play by choosing not to have the character of Phaedra sing the opening verses, and instead the mellow sounds of the hymn fade into the pulsing beats of trance music as the stage snaps into darkness punctuated by strobe lights, and partying.

It’s easy to be cynical about this production. The play already holds semi-mythological status in the British theatrical canon and with Mark Rylance’s God-like portrayal of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron fresh in the minds of many it’s certainly a brave choice.

Student Drama Societies

Dan Hutton: It’s only dawned on me fairly recently that there is something extremely arbitrary about the systems of various university drama scenes. We all turn up as Freshers, work out as quickly as we can how the system works, and then get subsumed into it without really thinking whether or not this is the best way of doing things. NSDF seems like the perfect place to discuss how our processes of selection work and whether or not there is room for improvement. Does this way of working produce the best possible theatre? Is it fair? What is the role of a student drama society?

At Warwick, the main selection process is for the Warwick Arts Centre studio, which is given to students six times a year. Whoever wants to produce something goes through the respective society (new writing, published plays or devised & adapted) and puts together a complete team and pack outlining their plans for the show. All these packs then present to a panel of randomly selected individuals (who aren’t on the execs of the societies) who then ask questions and eventually decide what goes through. On a smaller scale, each society also has its own selection process which ordinarily sees the exec choosing what goes through to get the cash.

This is an extremely simplified version of what happens, but as you can tell it’s a pretty convoluted process fraught with complications and problems. Are the processes any more straightforward at Cambridge and Bristol?

Hannah Greenstreet: Although I have dabbled in drama at university (including appearing as Knight 1 in a version of The Mysteries which turned out to be funded by the Christian Union!), I would define myself more as a critic than a theatre maker. Hence, to me and I think to a lot of others who aren’t completely enmeshed in the drama ‘scene’, the system for deciding which plays go on can seem pretty arcane and bureaucratic.

I think Cambridge is a little different from other universities because of the sheer proliferation of different societies, some connected to the different colleges and some functioning across the whole university. The drama scene is huge and immensely varied – one week near the end of term had something like fourteen different plays on and every week there tend to be at least four plays on, two at the ADC Theatre and two at the smaller, L-shaped Corpus Playroom. Although these are the main venues (and the ones that are the most competitive to stage plays in), there are also many other venues around Cambridge, from the black box of Pembroke New Cellars to the brutalist brickwork of St Chad’s Octagon.

Applications to stage drama in the ADC and the Corpus Playroom are managed by the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Society. The process tends to be shaken up by different committees, elected once a year, but generally involve a paper application, outlining, among other things, directorial vision and potential budget, as well as various rounds of interviews. The panel that decides which productions get to use the theatres and which get the all important funding is made up of the President, the committee and the staff of the theatre.

There are a whole other load of other processes for the college drama societies’ venues and funding. These really vary in terms of resources and seriousness. In some ways, the diversity is very good because it means that, if you put your mind to it, you can probably put on some theatre somewhere. However, all the different processes can be confusing and time consuming and, in practice, there tends to be a demarcation between productions at the more ‘professional’ looking ADC and at the multi-purpose theatres/sports halls/conference venues.

So, that’s the Cambridge theatre ‘scene’ in a nutshell. How about at Bristol?

George Meredith: I would say that the process in Bristol is more straightforward, but not necessarily better for being so. Student drama in Bristol is divided into around seven or so societies, the main two being Dramsoc and Spotlights, and then various other performance specific groups such as musical, opera, comedy etc. The selection process is all managed internally via organized proposals which occur in the months approaching a booked theatre slot. Anyone in the society can propose a play, and, having formed a basic production team, outline the merits and financial projections of their chosen piece. The society as a whole is made aware of the time and location of these proposals via email, and are invited to come and vote on which production they would like to be put on. What could be more democratic than that?

The trouble is that selection is based largely on those who are free/can be bothered to turn up, and obviously not everyone can come to every proposal (as a first year, I’ve only ever been to one). Also, rather than what I perceive as a fairly impartial selection process in Warwick and Cambridge, Bristol leaves room for rather selfish voting. ‘What play am I most likely to get a part in?’ is my first thought – Top Girls is not gonna get my vote. Furthermore, in the days leading up to proposals I am often approached by people asking me to come and support their play, which gives the selection process an awkward playground atmosphere: who has more friends?

This is a rather harsh appraisal of the system, and I’m sure many of the voters are not as cynically minded and just want to see the society producing the best theatre it possibly can. But it’s certainly not perfect.

It seems none of these processes are ideal, but how else could it be done?

DH: George, you say it seems better at Warwick, but it’s certainly the case that people will vote for what they’d most like to be involved in or the shows which they’d be confident auditioning for. Seeing as many of the directors and producers end up running the societies and can’t vote on the main panel, most productions err on “actors theatre”, for better or for worse.

I’ve always felt that, in an ideal world, the shows would be selected not by students (who will all have vested interests of some sort and various allegiances to other members) but by external professionals. This would no doubt be completely unsustainable and impossible to organise, but it may be worth starting there and working backwards.

I guess it comes down to what we think student theatre should do. Should it constantly be trying to create interesting, boundary-pushing, shit-yourself-with-excitement theatre? Should it be trying to, in a Benthamite Utopian kind of way, please as many people as possible? Or is its purpose simply to provide opportunities and skills for the “real world”? These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but they certainly need different processes of selection.

Basically, I find it tragic that at the age of twenty we’re already forced into a cynical, commercially-driven, highly bureaucratic system to make theatre.

HG: I agree with you Dan. Some kind of selection process involving industry professionals (rather like NSDF?!) would be good but also probably unsustainable. There is no perfect system. Whatever system you have will have some kind of arbitrary agenda, even if it is not explicit about it. Student theatre should be about a range of both of boundary pushing and crowd pleasing theatre. The ADC is often (sometimes unfairly) criticised for picking commercially ‘safe’ shows. But sometimes what seem to be the most crowd pleasing shows in terms of programming are also the most artistically interesting: I recently saw amazing productions of Ivanov and Three Sisters, played on alternate nights in the bowels of the technical workings of the ADC, seating the audience on the stage, behind the safety curtain. But you could see that as conservative programming, because it devoted two weeks to Chekhov instead of more experimental pieces. However, the advantage of having a range of different venues means that there will always be places willing to take the risk and stage something more experimental or site specific.

GM: You make a really good point Hannah. Programming choices are framed by the need to get people into the theatre and so the conservative is more popular as a safe bet. Not that conservative programming is necessarily bad. It’s just that university offers a comparatively safe environment in which to take a few risks and get things wrong, and selection should really try and capitalize on this in some way.

Perhaps we should develop on these points and try to formulate a more specific breakdown of what it is we want from a theatre selection process. Perhaps we could work backwards from your ideal situation Dan, with the involvement of industry professionals (although I am dubious whether an external set of agendas would be preferable to internal agendas, which are at least rooted in the vague interests of the society). How would this panel approach selecting shows? What should they objectively be looking for?

DH: It’s difficult to answer that question without at least getting something wrong or finding difficulties. Perhaps it’s best to start with what isn’t the right thing to look for. Those choosing which shows go on shouldn’t be picking the people with the most experience or the people they have spoken to most about the submission. They shouldn’t be looking for the most financially viable or commercially sound (considering SUs will normally foot the bill if something goes drastically wrong). And picking the show they will get a part in is plain wrong.

I think, really, it comes down to two questions which each member on a deciding committee should be asking. Do you find the proposed production interesting? Would you want to see this show? If the answer to those two questions is ‘yes’ then I guess we’re getting somewhere.

As I said earlier, this question ultimately comes down to ones of what we think student theatre is for. Is it to support and nurture the individual so that he or she may have a leg-up to a career in theatre? Or should it be about supporting and nurturing collectives and groups of people so that exciting, innovative productions and collaborations may be created, adding to the theatrical ecosystem and forcing us to ask bigger questions of ourselves both as artists and citizens? Our feelings about these questions are reflected in the way in which university theatre societies and companies choose what to produce, and it’s not good enough to simply accept the status quo. NSDF seems like the perfect platform to discuss practical questions like this and as we’ve begun to consider here, we can all learn from each other. What seems like a dull and purely pragmatic discussion at first actually ends up over time having a far-reaching and real-world effect on the kind of theatre we create.

Not a Review of Pornography

There are various reasons why I won’t be writing a review of Warwick University Drama Society’s production of Pornography (which, incidentally, I’ve now realised is essentially a History Play of the 21st century, documenting a very particular time in our society’s collective development). This is partly down to the fact that, for the past year, I have been in charge of the aforementioned society and, though I haven’t had any direct involvement in the creation of the production, I do at least know the ins-and-outs of its process. There are also a number of close friends and colleagues in the cast and creative team, which would undoubtedly alter the nature of my writing. Crucially, I’m actually not worried about offending them (they know how I feel about the production anyway and I know they can take what I say) but more with the impact that writing about them would have on the implications of my other reviews.

For though the review itself, in a hermetically sealed environment, may manage to weld my prior knowledge with thoughts on the production to say something mildly interesting about it, its very existence within a festival context would raise questions about other pieces I write over the course of this week. To write a review about a friend’s show to which I’ve had a close relationship, whether damning or praising, feels a little awkward when penning ten other reviews throughout the week about which I have very little prior knowledge.

This then raises wider questions about my own integrity as a writer and the compromises we have to consider when commenting on and documenting theatre. Where am I willing to draw the line when it comes to talking about friends? With whom do I decide to take up a pen? If I’ve met someone in the bar the night before and chatted about what they’re up to this week, does this mean I have to be more careful about what I say about their show? I wholeheartedly believe in aninteraction between theatre-maker and theatre-writer, but there is without doubt a point when a foot has to be put down and the writing has to stop. No matter how well-written the review or how accurate it is, if a critic writes about a show their partner has directed, you may question the validity of what’s being said. The problem is, I love theatre people. We all have that same passion in common and it would seem like a waste not to talk, discuss and critique together. The “lone reviewer”, as it were, misses out on that.

So then, what’s the ideal scenario? How much engagement should a critic have with the makers? And how much prior knowledge is preferable? Having an acquaintance with the makers you’re writing about is probably not a Bad Thing and may even bolster the argument of the piece, while a grasp of the questions being discussed allows for greater analytical and intellectual rigour in the deconstruction of the piece in question.

This week, we’re all bumping into each other, chatting about shows and reading one another’s reviews so there will always be a level of expectation that may go unchecked. If we notice it, however, and recognise our own fallibility, there should be no problem; we lay out the facts of circumstance alongside our own judgement in order to remain open and honest.

But I’m still not writing about Pornography.

“The Memory of Water” by Shelagh Stephenson

A woman lays on an old, dishevelled bed inside a small bedroom cluttered with the detritus of time. Wallpaper peels away from the skirting and draws fall off their rails and spill out onto the floor. This is our world for the next two and a half hours in a play that attempts to tackle questions of grief, adoption and – Lord help us – homeopathy, but falls short on all counts in a production that fails to engage on practically every level.

Admittedly, The Memory of Water was never going to be my cup of tea. Shelagh Stephenson’s naturalistic play about bereavement set in one room feels more like a mild form of torture than a night at the theatre. In the New Theatre’s production directed by Nicholas Hughes, however, whatever little life that had been present in the play is snuffed out and replaced with a tone akin to French farce and seems like little more than a vehicle for lead actor Rosanna Stoker.

It’s odd that the performances are so underwhelming in a production which by its very nature is so dependent on its actors. Aside from the two central characters of Mike and Mary, the characters are painted with wide brushstrokes and lack any humanity. Both Amy Brough-Aikin and Ben Williamson in the roles of Catherine and Frank seem to both be performing in a different play (namely the aforementioned French farce) and there looms a question mark over the fact that Catherine has a northern accent even though her two sisters speak in RP. At yesterday’s performance, the role of Teresa was played (after twenty-four hours rehearsal) by stage manager Eloise Hyde with script in hand, and staggeringly she seemed to be more at home in the play than both Williamson and Brough-Aikin.

As Mike, Ajay Stevenson lends an air of calm to proceedings, treading the line between dry humour and raw emotion and smartly playing the foil to Stoker’s sarcastic, emotionally closed Mary. Without a doubt, Stoker steals the show and is the only one of the cast to believably play a middle-aged woman who has just lost her mother.

The fact that a student drama society has chosen to produce a play about the grief of three middle-aged women is baffling to say the least. Though it’s perfectly acceptable to play out of age-group and mount plays which are close to the maker’s heart if that’s your thing, why go for a show which has practically nothing to say to our peer group?

The Memory of Water also raises questions about taste within the context of the National Student Drama Festival. Ordinarily, we as audiences choose what we’re going to pay money to see based on shows we’ve enjoyed in the past, carving out what we know to be our niche so that we waste neither time nor money. Here, however, where everyone sees everything, this choice is stripped away from us, so that we sit through productions that may be the complete opposite of our preferred style or form. Is it fair, then, to be critical about something which we were never going to enjoy no matter how accomplished or complete?

With The Memory of Water, however, these questions of intention, play choice and taste seem largely redundant, or rather secondary given that this is a dull, lazy production which rarely manages control over its tone. It flits between seventies sitcom and gritty BBC Four drama, sometimes playing for laughs and sometimes going for out-and-out melodrama. Hughes’s production, therefore, fails on multiple levels, having not managed to take control of the text, perform it coherently or draw out the central issues present. Worse than this, however, it struggles to justify itself, ending up making about the same amount of sense as homeopathy.

Theatre, Meet the Critics

We’ve been told enough times already that “NSDF is a unique opportunity” for everyone involved, whether an actor, director, producer, writer, designer, technician or tea lady, to hone their skills, meet new people and discover more about their discipline. There’s another unique opportunity, however, which we can easily overlook, and that is to create a genuine conversation between the people who make theatre and the people who write about it.

As Jake Orr described on these very pages earlier in the week, Dialogue is a project which has, over the course of about a year, tried to bring artists and writers together in a room to talk about their practice. Questions of ethics surrounding criticism, the usefulness of reviews and star ratings have all been considered in the discussions I’ve attended, with artists asking critics why they write and critics asking artists why they make theatre.

An opportunity like this at NSDF feels foolish to miss. The Noises Off office is exactly seven seconds away from the bar (I have just timed it) and there really ought to be more traffic between the two rooms. There are few other theatrical settings where you can write a review, file it and go and chat to the makers straight after, which may or may not make you want to change what you’ve said. Or where, as a theatre-maker, you can chat to a critic as they write about you.

This set-up also allows us to ask questions about the ethics of theatre-writing. Is it okay, for example, to go to the bar and chat to the company before writing the review? Or to bump into a company member one night and review their show later in the week? How does this affect the way we write about The Thing in question? Does this satisfy the readers’ “need” for “objectivity”?

My feeling is that these questions become less problematic in a context like this, which encourages experimentation with form and asks us to question the assumptions we already hold. We are all, for the most part, seeing the same shows, and so as writers may not have the same amount of responsibility to a readership as we ordinarily would in the “real world”. The responsibility might have shifted somewhat to focus more on the artists and give them more credit, so that – if anything – it could be deemed the responsible thing to do to talk to a company before writing about their show. Or not. But it’s worth a try.

Either way, I’ll see you in the bar.