*** "motherland" @ underbelly

tuesday 19th august 2008

Edinburgh Festival: Motherland
@ underbelly

And another exceptional experience
Verbatim theatre made from interviews with mothers & partners from north east england of soldiers serving in iraq & afghanistan
Four actors play a dozen or more different women - sometimes falling into & out from each other, sometimes very focused, sometimes a solo voice, sometimes together as mother & daughter or friends so that we get depth as well as breadth. Performed with such truth & honesty that for the entire 1 hour 20 I never question or come out from feeling like I am listening to these women rather than the actors playing them.
Simply staged with a either canvas or plastic tarpaulin backcloth that held the projected names of the characters and as a closing film of soldiers morphing into a final image of a lace-curtained window looking out to a bit of tree. The women sit on shell boxes and the only other props are flowers that are snipped to fit a vase, framed photos of loved ones we never fully get to see, janice's file documenting her battle to find out the truth of her son's death, a mobile phone one of the women is using to text her just returned boyfriend, a microphone that is taken up twice by the women who have taken their grief into a public campaign.
The verbatim scripting give these stories the ring of truthful authenticity that this show accentuates and heightens rather than colours or distorts and the accumulative effect is of a group of smart articulate warm funny honest thinking and previously invisible and unheard women with a great deal of importance to say.
And emotionally it leaves me undone.

Special moments include:
+ the woman who holds the mike out to us in an eloquent undoing expression of helpfulnessless, voicelessness, powerlessness - and I know we are not intended to take it but at the same time I feel guilty & culpable for not reaching out to her;
+ all the stories of mothers finding out their child has been killed - one who has lost the daughter who had already had to bury two fiancés after road accidents and is now still locked in a bitter anger for all Iraqis, one a mother who persuaded the son who was killed 18 months after signing up to be a soldier rather than a footballer so as to have a longer career than 18months, and one who hears her son is dead from her daughter-in-law in a call to her mobile while she is alone on a bus, and who then learns that if she hadn't the phoned the base herself she would have had to find this out from the television because parents of married soldiers are not next of kin and currently are not included for a personal visit from service personnel.
Verbatim theatre at its absolute finest.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/Motherland#

*** 66a Church Road - Daniel Kitson @ traverse

*** exceptional experience
66a Church Road - Daniel Kitson
@ traverse

66a Church Road - a Lament Made of memories and kept in suitcases

Superlative wonderful Show fluent and funny and evocative warm and human -storytelling doesn't get any finer than this

We arrive down the treacherously Steeped Stairs of traverse one and get front row seats The Stage is set with an array of old fashioned Suitcases that immediately trigger us into stories of other times and people from our lives - even before the show begins we get to enjoy sweet forgotten memories

Daniel comes on in a brown Suit, takes off his jacket and rolls up his Shirt Sleeves He sits on a chair Surrounded by Suitcases and starts to tell us the story of his six year relationship with his flat in crystal palace Each chapter is punctuated with an audio playback of another related memory usually involving him in a relationship with his father trying to Sit with dignity on the blow- up chair, with one or several girls he is involved with, with himself. With his home And these moments are magically illustrated with a variety of models and projections Into and within the Suitcases _ a projection of a room The light Shining through the slatted blinds film of his Street, looking Out through his front door to new fallen Snow and a model of his entire 3 story flat Not all of these are fully visible even from the Front and after his curtain call he completely wins my heart by coming back to explain the idea for these models only came a month ago and long after this space was arranged - the traverse needing to be more organised than i am and they have tried unsuccessfully to make them visible in Such a large space. So they are all re-lit and people are invited to file past the Stage to see them on their way out and _ holy wow! - people are welcome to take photos. This man lives my manifesto.
And this is how he Starts his story - conjuring around the emotional resonances of 'home' _ a place we go hope to find but can never really seriously go looking for 'What are you looking for in a home?' Might be the question the estate agents ask but the answer is always '' it depends...'
We hear about john his long-suffering friend Who houses him while he looks for his home And we hear alot about his landlord who is very much the Villain of this story and the cause of Daniel's eventual break-up with and leaving of 66A Church Road
This performance is packed and textured with language and observations and humanity and Spirit and love and music - literally as well as in the sounds of the spoken written speech The breaks between chapters also allow a bit of Space for Some of our own memories and associations to puff and swirl and breathe the air a little.

the Tiger Lilies' 7 Deadly Sins with Nathan Evans & Ophelia Bitz

the Tiger Lilies' 7 Deadly Sins with Nathan Evans & Ophelia Bitz
@ The Famous Spiegeltent
edinburgh fringe festival

we queue as per usual to get into the venue in the Spiegel Garden - a carnival atmosphere the trees white with dappled spotlight and huge crowds including a long long line just to get into the area
The Famous SpiegeLten+ is like an old fashioned merrygo round with the horses removed to make boothed seating. a bar at the entrance this is going to be punk Kabaret.
On stage a drumset with a toilet for its seat, a piano, a microphone a slender cello and in a Corner a red and white Striped Punch & Judy tent
Enter Nathan- modern camp pretty and oozing confidence through flirting eyes. He gets us to call ''wake up mr punch" and amazingly to me the crowd obliges in full pantomime chorus and despite being called "boys and girls" Nathan then disappears into the tent to animate punch and 'jude' and a pig policeman and the devil with an enormous penis {to whack mr punch with}. This is classic punch the judy performed with all its traditional zest violence and offensiveness albeit this time with full uncensored swearing sex and class A drug taking. Consequently it leaves me cold

The Tiger Lilies are an exceptional band whose lead singer is ideally suited to kabaret, his face painted white with dark skull-like eyes. he plays piano, ukelele & accordian and in many ways this feels like his show with the rest there to provide a setting for him. His voice - often in falsetto - is rich and expressive. And the best of this show is his vocals The show involves a dirty and bleakly negative trawl through the 7 Deadly Sins and the finest moment for me is the haunting song for Sloth with pheremone and gayboy Sweetly melodic on the oboe and sexy in shirtless braces, tatoos and wings
Ophelia Bitz bringing On the Sin labels and Swinging her tits about - best is her Mrs Loveitt moment pouring gin from the bottle Wedged in her cleavage
The rest is too samey too Knowingly wanting to offend and too musical hall for me to really enjoy
The crowd on the other hard adored it

"self-accusation" by peter handke @ C socco

unfinished posting
thursday 14th august 2008

"Self-Accusation"
by Peter Handke
Theatre du jour

Lots of words. A soundscape of moments from a life
An examination of small and large moments - good bad and neutral - listed through an entire life
Interpretative self- provocation coming from the ego or the id
A long poem performed sometimes vocally so as to present as music a choral piece, and sometimes as heavily {over}acted performance
It's best moments for me are in its vocal layering when there's enough neutrality to let me weave out from the density of the language and I found the heavy physical expressiveness of alot of it contaminated my experience. I also found the soundtrack mostly distracting - except the siren which made me reflect on the large and little consequences that might follow or flow from any of these listed moments.
The best of this for M was being able to chase and channel our own thoughts through the repetition and the rituals and the chanting. And he liked the individual performances they were each giving and the ways they actioned the many different moments.
Most of all it reaffirmed my huge interest in and admiration for handke's theatre and burned a wish to make something of his one day

Best Moments

It started with each performer with the same text mostly but not always out of synch so you received one as an echo of what was heard already but for each different & uniquely inflected and curved in & out
Then the back-to-back turning with the performer facing us miming the words the Other behind was voicing.
They start in grey then get red clothes and props from their suitcases to wear and brandish.

very accomplished difficult highly finessed performances that I just wanted to ring truer or at least leaving more for me to bring

"free outgoing" @ traverse

unfinished posting
wednesday 13th august 2008

"Free Outgoing"
Royal Court Theatre presents
International Playwrights: A Genesis Project
at Traverse

Mother Son Daughter Chenai Tamil sex on the net seedy friend astute neighbour live on T.V.India
jackals at the door

"He's a tamil - he'll bear a grudge into his next life"

Seeing {only} what you go looking for

Sitting in the front and feeling like we're in the room with them

Terrific writing and rivetting central performance - all good performances

Traditional vs internet cultures

A world that is more recognisable than unfamiliar

"macbeth who is that bloodied man?" (Teatr Biuro Podròzy)

thursday 7th august 2008

MACBETH Who is That Bloodied Man?
(an outdoor performance, commissioned by : Cork European Cultural Capital 2005 and premiered in Cork, 20-25 of May)
Teatr Biuro Podròzy
http://www.tbp.ipoznan.pl/recmakeng.html
Director: Pawel Szkotak
Music: Wiki Nowikow
Design: Teatr Biuro Prodozy and Iza Kolka
outside national theatre
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/macbeth

It is based on William Shakespeare's "Macbeth". It tells of human fate determined by destiny and inner necessity. It shows the world during the horror of war, the world of nightmares, the world in blood, where it is legal to betray, to intrigue, to kill. It reminds you of the tragic consequence, that crime once committed will be continued, and man's death is not man's end - he comes back as fear, remorse and obsession. The performance portrays the world of chaos, where the order of nature is replaced by the logic of death. It takes place on the borderline of reality and nightmare, where earthly characters coexist with witches and ghosts. The inspiration to this performance is the attempt to see Shakespeare's drama as a crime myth. Particularly, nowadays when human life is of less and less value, and crime is becoming the ordinary act, rarely accompanied by indecision and doubts. The performance makes spectacular use of moving set, motorbikes, stilts and fire.

poles like tree trunks are lit by witches on stilts rattling clacker-boards
a bloody ruthless army of men in black leather on motorbikes pulling a variety of trailors incl the naked thane of cawdor in a cage
the dead in black on stilts
fire on poles
the youngest banquo cheeky on a toy bike, playing with the crown on a pole
great soaring operatic music
lady macbeth leeringly mad waving her torch and jumping the perilously red carpeted iron scaffolding
a comic scene with the servants climaxing in a apple-eating lovemaking scene
the witches on stilts chasing macbeth with a giant roller filled with skulls

later scenes lit behind the iron-guazed set we had to guess at cos we couldn't really see - lady macbeth's mad scene and then her husband finding her hanging behind a door, macbeth burning in the final scene

at its best it was dangerous and thrilling - the motorbike chases through the fire
alot of the time it was impressive but too often one-dimensional and static somehow - despite being an intensely physical show - too easy to 'read' and so too little for our minds

More the charred bones of Shakespeare's play than the flesh, Biuro Podrozy's outdoor spectacle leaves the acrid smell of burned bridges in your nostrils. It is one long and exhilarating blast of images wrapped around thundering music, licking flames and wafting smoke. Lady Macbeth's body is found hanging behind a closed door; the witches lurk among the trees assaulting your ears with football rattles; Macbeth plays tag with a stilt-walking Death and a huge barrel of his victims' skulls. The great trick of this Polish company's approach is to make the play seem both medieval and utterly contemporary, conjuring the bloody dictators of the past half-century without ever mentioning any names. It is cleverly general and specific at the same time, giving the audience room to impose their own meanings. We first catch sight of Macbeth and Banquo riding motorcycle and sidecar in the wastelands of war, while back at headquarters strategies are planned and naked prisoners killed. The weapons of these gun-toting macho warriors prove useless against the veiled figures of the three witches, who survive bullets like some particularly nasty aliens. There is little text, and the compressed story sometimes feels like it hurtles from vaulting ambition to madness and death in a twinkle. Nevertheless this show still manages to be subtle in its depiction of life under the dictatorship of the Macbeths. The immediate tensions between Macbeth and Banquo are well drawn and there is a wonderful scene in which the domestic becomes tarnished by death as Duncan's bloody sheets are hung out to wash at almost the same time as Banquo's murder. The piece's imagery is cleverly thought out: beginning in a wasted forest, the charred tree trunks are felled as Macbeth's victims are dispatched and rise again at the end to become Birnam Wood advancing upon the castle. Banquo's son plays a pivotal role, a ghostly vision of the future who playfully haunts the present and who, in the final moments, climbs through the burning castle to retrieve Macbeth's crown for himself. It's a production that shows this magnificent Polish company at its best, and a reminder that large-scale outdoor theatre really can be thoughtful, as well as an eyeful.
Lyn Gardner:
The Guardian 07/08/2007

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/MacbethWhoIsThatBloodiedMan#