London round-up: The Constituent, Passing Strange, The Bounds
I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts. Plus an interview with Abi Zakarian.
This week saw me attempting to escape the oppressive heat in the Balkans by visiting the UK, which turned out to be a not wholly successful strategy. I took the opportunity to see some work while I was there and to have an illuminating chat with British-Armenian playwright Abi Zakarian, whose new play for young people opens in the National Theatre’s Connections Festival this week, about the absence of Armenian stories on stage.
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The Constituent, Old Vic
This new play by Joe Penhall, whose past work includes psychiatric drama Blue/Orange and the Netflix series Mindhunter, marks the return to the London stage of James Corden, who launched his career here with Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and Richard Bean’s farce One Man, Two Guvnors before going off to the US to do talk show stuff and sing in cars.
It’s an undeniably topical play in which Anna Maxwell Martin plays a backbench MP faced with the increasingly volatile behaviour of Corden’s damaged ex-serviceman, whose marriage is failing. I sort of liked the fact that Penhall resisted the urge to go down the obvious route and place Martin’s character in peril but instead to focus more on her attempts to maintain connected with the people she represent in a culture where politician’s safety is increasingly at risk. Two UK MPs – Jo Cox and David Ames – have been murdered in recent years, and of course, recently Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico was shot and seriously wounded. This increased sense of threat and its psychological impact on politicians is a fascinating topic to explore, and the play throws around a lot of other ideas, many potentially interesting ones, but never in a satisfying way, I also admired the way it focused on the everyday nuts-and-bolts reality of being a working MP, but once again this felt undeveloped. The whole play felt oddly undercooked, something not helped by director Matthew Warchus’ rather fitfully paced production -so many unnecessary scene changes - which veered in tone between the dramatically underpowered and the outright clunky. But the actors did their best with what they were given, Martin and Corden are both strong stage actors, even if it the production itself was underwhelming. Here's my review for the Evening Standard.
Passing Strange, Young Vic
This semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age rock musical by American musician Stew (yes, just Stew) was a big hit in the US back in 2008, transferring to Broadway, and racking up seven Tony nominations and one win for best book. Spike Lee made a film of it. The show is performed as a gig with the musicians onstage and the cast playing backing singers to a frontman/narrator, originally also played by Stew which presumably gave the show a personal edge. It must have felt fresh and exciting at the time, but London in 2024 isn’t 2008 New York. A lot of theatre has come and gone since then and what might have once felt like an adrenalin show, now feels a little less revelatory.
An unnamed young man, just referred to as Youth, rebels against what he feels are the forces constricting his creativity, his LA church and his mother, who he clearly regards as overbearing even though she’s just doing regular mother stuff. After smoking some weed with the head of the choir, he heads off to Europe on a journey of self-discovery, to do a James Baldwin and embark on a quest for ‘the real’ on the other side of the Atlantic. This initially involves smoking a lot more weed and having his eyes opened by the sexually liberated women of Amsterdam, before ending up in what was then West Berlin hanging out with a community of artists. As a young Black man in Europe, he’s aware he’s a source of fascination and there’s some interesting reflections on race, identity and performance, but elsewhere the storytelling felt a little flimsy.
While Youth eventually grows up, there’s little sense of being politically reshaped by his experiences and while we are often invited to laugh at his naivety and self-involvement - “It’s weird when you wake up in the morning and realise that your entire adult life was based on a decision made by a teenager. A stoned teenager,” as he puts it in one of the night’s best lines - that doesn’t stop the whole thing from feeling, you know, quite self-involved. The European characters are intentionally broad and stereotyped and the women are interchangeable (literally in a played-for-laughs three-in-a-bed scene). When the Big Life Lessons are finally learned, it felt platitudinous and cathartic.
But while I found the narrative frustrating in places, the performances were another matter. Giles Terera, who originated the role of Aaron Burr in the West End production of Hamilton, plays the role of the Narrator with off-the-charts charisma – even when the stage briefly malfunctioned, he was able to whip things up again instantly. Everyone on stage brings their A-game, including the musicians. The skill of the cast means the show is never less than engaging. Even though I was left feeling a bit disappointed by the show, I could understand why some of the audience were seriously into it. The cast are amazing and Terera more than delivers the goods.
The Bounds, Royal Court
It’s 1553, and a game is underway. A massive, chaotic football match pitting the residents of Allendale and Catton, two villages in the northeast of England, against each other. The match can go on for days. People have been known to die in the melee. (It is not dissimilar from the raucous Shrovetide matches that are still played in some places today, presumably with less deaths).
Percy (Ryan Nolan) and Rowan (Lauren Waine) are stuck on the side-lines, about as far away from the action as its possible to be. They can’t even really see the action from where they are. They are Allendale all the way even as it gradually becomes apparent that their banishment to the periphery, to the misty fringes, is because they are not exactly valued members of the community, they are outsiders both,
Playwright Stewart Pringle – who also wrote the Papatango award-winning Trestle - has a knack for playfully anachronistic dialogue that deftly merges period-appropriate blaspheming - God’s bones and similar - with more contemporary expletives (and one well-deployed cunt which made someone in the audience gasp). He captures what it means to root for a team, to have your sense of self entangled with sense of place. The writing is properly funny but also contains an undercurrent of strangeness. Rowan is given to visions and describes, in vivid detail, witnessing the birth of a horribly deformed lamb. A bad omen.
Then Samuel (Soroosh Lavasani) rocks up, a posh bloke in a doublet and cape with a creepily unwavering smile. He’s an educated fellow, been down south to Oxford, which also makes him an outsider, an object of suspicion. Percy takes against him immediately, calling him ‘Fat Sam’ but it’s the arrival of an eerily aloof young boy who really blows a hole in Percy’s world, informing him an offhandedly, that thanks to a whim of Edward VI, the boundaries are changing. For Percy, this is reality-shattering.
The full scope of the play’s ambition is revealed at the end. The characters find themselves in a temporal thin place, the future within view. It’s pretty audacious. Percy and Rowan are placed in a historical continuum, gifted with the knowledge that people like them will always be fodder, for future wars, for the political whims of those far away, for catastrophes yet to happen. One day fire will rain from the sky. One day the world will burn.
I’m not sure Jack McNamara’s production quite sticks this landing, but it’s still an atmospheric chamber piece, with excellent performances, particularly from Waine, with her air of resignation, her surface hardness masking her sense of betrayal by her community, her flesh still marked by the scold’s bridle, a grim punishment for women who dared to use their voice.
The Bounds uses local history - Pringle is from Allendale and the play premiered at Newcastle’s Live Theatre - to speak to wider themes of social and geographic inequality, the political establishment’s neglect of the north, and what it means to belong to a place. Like Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England with less hallucinogens and more lines about cat-shagging, similar in spirit to Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, it’s a play rooted in past and place that stretches across the centuries.
Interview with Abi Zakarian: “If Armenians don’t tell our stories, no one else will”
Every year the National Theatre’s Connections programme commissions a batch of new plays specifically written for young people to perform. British-Armenian playwright Abi Zakarian was one of this year’s commissioned writers, with her play Age is Revolting, which opens this week as part of the Connections Festival. “It is the most brilliant brief,” she says. The plays are intended to be performed by teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19, and they need to accommodate a cast of between nine and 30 people. They will be performed at drama clubs, youth and community groups around the UK. The groups get to pick which of the 10 Connections plays they want to perform.
Zakarian’s play is about a group of teenagers who suddenly find themselves inhabiting the bodies of 80-year-olds. “I wanted to write about society's attitude towards young people, but society's attitude towards elders, and how they're both disenfranchised by society in terms of their worth.” This changes how society treats them, and when they try to tell people what’s happened, Zakarian explains, “this mirrors the behaviours of somebody suffering with cognitive decline or dementia.”
As a writer, Zakarian often explores her Armenian heritage but she is from Derby - as is her father, who comes from a family of miners - and wanted to explore the other side of her family background in her work. Welfare, which opens this September at Derby Theatre, is about the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp in Skegness, which she hadn’t heard about her dad mentioned it in passing. The camp was initially set up as somewhere where miners could go to convalesce, but later they were able to go there on holiday with their families. The Derbyshire Miners Association lobbied for it, with the belief that everyone deserves a trip away, by the sea. For many of the miners and their families, she explains, it would have been the first holiday they’d ever been on. Welfare is a big play, following one family over five generations throughout the course of the life of the holiday camp, she explains, “which also mirrors the rise and decline of mining industry.” It’s a fascinating piece of little-known social history, she says, and “I just wanted to write something that would at least leave a trace of it, because there's very little about it out there.”
One play that has yet to see the light of day is Mountain Warfare, a play exploring, among other things, the Armenian genocide. It’s a big, sweeping, meaty play, exploring diaspora identity, generational trauma and “why there is ignorance around certain conflicts.”
She received a MGC Futures Bursary which allowed her to go to Yerevan, capital of Armenia to research the play, and visit the Genocide Memorial. She was the first in her family to return there after her grandfather fled the country and, she says, she “wasn't quite prepared for how much of an impact it would have, emotionally and mentally.”
The play was a finalist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, but has yet to be performed. Zakarian thinks this is at least in part because of the subject matter. It’s deemed too niche, too specialist. Theatres often claim to want ‘untold stories’ but how true this is in practice remains debatable. When you’re of Armenian heritage, she says, you need to do a lot of explaining and educating about your history and why it matters. “I feel like I have to constantly explain myself and why this story is valid,” she says. “To explain why you need to know about the genocide, about the cultural erasure that's going on, about the wars that are constantly being fought.”
It's hard to escape the feeling in the West at least that some conflicts take precedence in the collective consciousness, that there is a hierarchy of crisis in the media. When Azerbaijan launched an offence to take back control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, known as Artsakh by Armenians, last year, the story made the headlines, but remained there only briefly, even though tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians were forced to flee.
She was, she says, invited to explore some of these themes as part of the Bush Theatre’s Protest series, which enable writers to respond rapidly to world events. You can watch her contribution, We Are Our Mountains, here. When you make a piece like this, she says. you hope you can at least open a few eyes. “If you can just get five other people thinking about it, or writing to their MPs, or just reading a book about it, that’s something,” she says.
There’s a strange double-bind that comes from being from a group whose stories are underrepresented. “I would love nothing better than to not have to keep writing on the genocide. I would love to write the beautiful stories about Armenians,” she says. “It's exhausting, but you keep going,”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Demons (Berlin) – Following a similar project in Basel, Sebastian Nübling and Boris Nikitin reteam for a piece of urban live cinema, sending their actors out into the streets of Berlin followed by a camera with the resulting footage watched by audiences on a screen in the Maxim Gorki Theatre where it premieres on 28th June.
Festival d’Avignon - France’s premier international arts festival gets underway on 29th June with a programme including work by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Angelica Liddell, Boris Charmatz and festival director Tiago Rodrigues (with Hecuba, Not Hecuba) performed in venues around the sun-drenched medieval city. It runs until 21st July.
Festival Off Avignon – One of the biggest fringe festivals in Europe, the Off offers an eclectic, wide-ranging programme of theatre, dance, circus, magic and other fun stuff from French and international artists in venues across the city and in its streets and courtyards. It runs from the 3rd until the 21st July.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, thoughts or other comments you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com