'fall of the peacock throne' (wildbird)

Wildbird presents
Fall of the Peacock Throne
by Chris Lee
Southwark Playhouse
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/whatson_detail.php?record_number=114
March 5th 2009 - March 28th 2009
Show starts: 7.30pm
Running time: 100mins


Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross

Creative Team
Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross
http://www.wildbird.org.uk/

Innovative new Highland theatre company, Wildbird, presents the world premiere of Fall of the Peacock Throne.
Raymond Chandler meets Greek tragedy in this political thriller charting the story of the 1953 Iranian coup alongside that of Alexander’s invasion of Persia in 333BC.
Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution the play depicts the moment when fledging Iranian democracy was strangled at birth in favour of British oil interests and US cold war strategy. This is one of the biggest skeletons in the western closet and the root cause of the so-called ‘war on terror’, a defining event that lies at the heart of western fear of the Islamic world.
Intimate in its design and execution, but epic in reach, Fall of the Peacock Throne tackles issues of conscience, empire, freedom, and power. This is a story everyone should know, whose timeless echoes thunder in our ears, demanding to be heard.
Wildbird are a new contemporary performance and multi arts company from Moray in the north east of Scotland. The artistic team was originally brought together to work on National Theatre of Scotland’s Crucible and Macbeth projects and formed Wildbird in 2006. Wildbird set out to make work that is epic, political and truly theatrical, tackling difficult and important subjects. Fall of the Peacock Throne is their second full length theatre production.

We walk into a hazy disorientating space cut through with laser beams. A projection says Tehran 1953 and when this simple sign is multiplied around the walls and the great vaulted brick ceiling we feel like we are not just getting information but inhabiting Tehran 1953. After this the film & lighting effects are more cosmetic diversions than integrated into the performance.

Athena arrives as the chorus - supplying narration, commentary and with us witness to the dual stories of opposing powers - FBI man Kermit Roosevelt vs. Mossadeq and Alexander vs. Darius in a much earlier coup. Athena is given power to apparently manipulate too - both by incitement to violent domination and in her apparent arrangements of battles. A pity then that the only female character has to be such a stereotypical sex symbol.

The play is mostly words and there are a lot of them. It seems amateur in the old fashioned sense of people doing it because they cared altho unfortunately the acting has too much of an amateurish quality and needed a much stronger performance style - more in the Brechtian mould and less or much better focused naturalism. But you sense great integrity in the writing- we trusted the material and the ethics that come with it. And it is most certainly a story that wants telling.

Playing it traverse does not harm it at all, but it didn’t add anything either: the adversarial tension of the two opposing forces wasn't revealed any more sharply in this stand-off spatial arrangement in the ways it was used so effectively in scotland thing and russian one.
The show remains Earthbound by perhaps too much stuff and too many words and probably too little distance by its writer to fully make the performance soar. But the material is good enough to easily imagine another director or company with greater objective distance giving it fuller flight.

Post Show Talk with Chris Lee
Script a combination of real stuff and stuff I've written
Also cf. 'Counter Coup' by Kermit Roosevelt

This coup was the first prototype american coup -there have been 36 since then

Iran was riddled with MI6 at this time, the British had only recently been kicked out

One of the things I wanted to explore living is Aberdeenshire where most families are employed by BP The most important thing I wanted you to get was that Mossadeq stayed true to his principles

For the last decade most plays seem to be about two people or stage talking about their feelings but I don’t get out to theatre much

I wanted to look at the idea of power - power as a moral force. But also about leadership. But also it’s about empire as well. And also to address the issue that our politicians stand up and say one thing but do another and lie about it.

Meant to make it feel like a film noi with Athena as femme fatale
The battle scene film from Cecil B de Mille's ‘Ten Commandments’

Inspiration was wanting to say something about the Iraq war. And I’ve known Ali since I was born and l wanted to honour that. Wrote the first bits in 2000. and its the 3Oth anniversary of the revolution this year. If you didn't know this story you could be fooled into fighting a war thinking it was ‘a just war’.

For these things to be done and then swept under the carpet isn't right so we need to tell stories about it.

Churchill’s memo to Eisenhower: ‘After we've got rid of Mossadeq I won't touch your oil in Saudi Arabia if you don't touch mine in Iraq’.
Mossadeq’s last speech 'They will say about me...’ are all things they did say about him in the commons.

"shakespeare's r&j" (the original theatre company)

saturday 2nd august 2008

"shakespeare's r&j"
by joe calarco
the original theatre company
http://www.originaltheatre.com/productions.asp
Produced by The Original Theatre Company and South Hill Park Arts Centre with Max Lewendel
Directed by Alastair Whatley
Designed by Victoria Spearing
Lighting by Alan Valentine
Costume by Fiona Davis

Student one (plays Romeo) ......... Christopher Hogben
Student Two (plays Juliet and Benvolio) ..... Tom Hackney
Student Three (plays Mercutio, Lady Capulet and Friar Lawrence) ..... Craig Gilbert
Student Four (plays Tybalt, Balthasar and The Nurse) ............. Sam Donnelly
http://www.originaltheatre.com/cast.asp?ProductionNameID=4

Set in the 1950’s at an exclusive boarding school, four pupils run into the chapel late one night in a bid to escape from their repressive school routines and begin reading the story aloud. School and social rules are addressed and shattered as the students come to understand the real price of challenging fate and the true dangers of forbidden love.
As both the stories of Romeo and Juliet and the four lads unfold during the course of one thrilling evening; audience and actors alike discover the power of theatre and the new worlds it can open up. Highly energetic, physical and packed with the energy of youth and beauty of Shakespeare language this really is Shakespeare at his most accessible and daring.
at southwark playhouse
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/whatson.php

Even before it starts we hear a soundtrack of latin conjugations; a master teaching Shakespeare's sonnets; singing 'Jerusalem' ...

It then starts with three of the boys in vestments praying and wafting incense. Arriving late comes the boy who will instigate the play and play romeo - not sure why? - although the play will finish with the same three boys rushing off to resume their school lives perhaps unchanged by their experience of making the play leaving the same fourth boy alone and deeply affected by what has happened.
There is then a bit of setting up business between the boys that never really gets explained or goes anywhere and so felt an unnecessary prologue. Altho now i remember that it does again make the distinction between the three and the one, and so with hindsight and much reflection i am seeing the undertow of the boys' stories as a coming out for the loner boy who plays romeo. Even though this works against the sense of ensemble created from the four boys making the whole play together? So a confusing effect that is just possibly deliberate - if we allow that this confusion of un/belonging is so much a part of a queer arrival out into the world?)
Anyway - eventually we go from a night time torch-lit boys' escapade into the playing of the play - although even allowing for a 1950s world requires a fairy hefty leap of faith in accepting the acting out of romeo and juliet as the best dare-devilish idea the boys could conceive!

The programme notes say that this is a way to see one of Shakespeare's most famous plays with fresh eyes and to some large extent it does just that. Watching four 1950s public school lads play all the roles means most particularly that the love scenes between romeo and juliet have a very fresh rawness and ache to them and the queer love that emerges between the two boys playing r & j has the same force of forbidden love as the original lovers faced. And the violence is often strikingly savage - even appearing to get out of hand and with a real viciousness about it - especially the kicking of juliet after she is told of tybalt's death and romeo's banishment.

But unfortunately despite the strong energy and determined playing of all four actors this play is just too problematic and mixed up between the most of it that is Shakespeare and the undercurrent that is a more confusing story of the boys to really fly. We're supposed to see romeo actually fall in love with the boy who plays juliet and this reciprocated except that their kisses - lacking the urgent realness and over-the-edgeness that the violence has - come across as stage kissing and so miss being genuinely challenging.
The show ends with the romeo actor alone onstage abandoned by all of his friends who have fled to back to class "I dreamed... I dreamed... I dreamed ..." so maybe it is that we are have been shown the moment of one boy's queer awakening rather than two boys falling in love?

Part of its freshness and energy comes from their making of the play from the materials to hand. Set in a chapel these are the pews variously arranged and a white sheet that serves from an altar cloth to a way of fighting as well as a variety of drapes
The music and lighting effects are simple and effective.
The actors are committed and sincere.
A lot about it I would expect to like a lot.
But all this did not a thrilling experience make.

Perhaps it is partly because of recently seeing the factory's “hamlet” which does much of this freshness but with a much greater edginess because you know they are making it fresh each time in each new space they find themselves in - although they have no intention to tell any simultaneous story about the actors.
Also I think the direction needed to give us more moments of ambiguity: are we seeing the actor playing the scene or are we seeing the actor revealed through their playing out the scene?
Still this is a very immediate experience that was easy to stay involved and engaged in, and maybe they want us to remain unsure about what we are witnessing.
And they make the best use of the southwark playhouse space I've so far seen.
So ... ?
I continue to vacillate between wanting to love it and finding it disappointing short of the mark and then wanting to value what it could be shooting for and then finding it disappointingly short of the mark…
I imagine this would be a great play for a [brave] student production but I am left wishing this professional production had dared go just that little bit further.