London round-up: Cold War, Ghosts, Talking About the Fire and an interview with Chris Thorpe
London round-up: Cold War, Ghosts, Talking About the Fire and an interview with Chris Thorpe
I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week, in a break from normal programming, I’ve written a round-up of the work I saw during my most recent trip to London. I’ve previously written about Lucy Kirkwood and Dave Malloy’s musical adaption of Roald Dahl’s The Witches for the National Theatre for my column in The Bookseller and about James Fritz’s The Flea in the bonus subscriber edition of the newsletter, but I squeezed in several other shows while I was there and have thoughts about them all.
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Cold War - an east wind
Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film Cold War is a story of doomed love set in Poland and France in the two decades following the Second World War. It’s beautifully shot, its black-and-white cinematography is at once ravishing and stark. It’s also the basis of a new play with musical elements (I think that’s the best way to describe it) at the Almeida Theatre, adapted by Conor McPherson, directed by Rupert Goold and with music by Elvis Costello.
When the production was first announced there was at lot of online pushback about the lack of Polish cast and creatives involved in the production, a frustration no doubt compounded by the lack of representation and engagement within the theatre industry with the large numbers of first-generation Polish migrants living in the UK. Time Out critic Andrzej Lukowski elegantly distils the discussion here. I am at once sympathetic with and conflicted by some of these arguments. As someone of mixed Balkan heritage, I always find myself wondering where does the line lie in terms of representation? Not everyone wants their background picked over - families are complicated, identity is complicated. And yet at the same time there remains a palpable lack of eastern European stories on major stages (and when we do get an eastern European character they are often stereotypes: cleaners, sex workers, gangsters).
So these questions of representation were still fresh in my mind when I went to see Cold War (I saw it early in previews so can’t comment on the final production).
Cold War is at once a passionate love story and a story about the relationship between folk music, communism and national identity in a country still numb from the war. Musician Wiktor (Luke Thallon) becomes besotted with Zula (Anya Chalotra), an ambitious young performer during auditions he is holding for a state-sponsored folk music ensemble. Wiktor and Zula quickly develop a passionate, ultimately destructive attraction to one another, but the times they are living in, and the pressures they face as artists in a communist system, push them apart. Eventually Wiktor defects and ends up living Paris. Zula can’t bring herself to go with him.
It’s a relatively unshowy production by Rupert Goold’s standards, more of a mood piece. Yes, there are moments of zippy choreography and moments of humour but it’s essentially quite a downbeat affair, laced with longing. Goold gives everything a tobacco-laced melancholic air, and the show interlaces Polish folk music with Costello’s plaintive compositions. Chalotra is suitably vital as Zula, the epitome of beautifully damaged, Thallon cool and reserved. Jon Bausor’s set, a faded, war-scarred theatre, ensures we can never quite escape the past, even when the characters make it across the Iron Curtain.
While the original film lasts less than 90 minutes, the production is almost an hour longer, which can make it feel a bit drawn out, though at the same time this does make the gradual realisation of everything Wiktor’s been bottling up - the guilt, the complicity - hit harder. When he starts to break, it has more of an impact.
I founded myself admiring the production on several levels - the performances are strong, particularly Thallon, there’s entertaining support from Elliott Levey and it is always an engaging watch - while also still wondering what a version with, say, a Polish composer on board would have looked and sounded like, what it would have felt like. I understand that cross-cultural adaptation is a kind of translation. It necessitates a different lens. That’s part of the process. (I did wonder if they had considered offering Polish surtitled performances). You could sense that care had been taken, with coaches for the Polish (and Russian) singing, but there were still places were I found myself wanting more from it, something deeper. For all its considerable atmosphere, it increasingly felt unrooted, chilly and adrift.
Ghosts - Joe Hill-Gibbins does Ibsen
Joe Hill-Gibbins is a director who is at home in the arena of the seedy. He excels at physicalising spiritual corruption and loves a bold visual motif. His 2012 production of Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling saw actors smearing themselves with jelly and custard. He placed a pyramid of blow-up sex dolls on stage for Measure for Measure at the same venue and had his cast wading through mud for his 2017 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In previous interviews – including this 2020 one in The Stage, which looking back must have been one of the last pre-pandemic interviews they published - he’s discussed how Stefan Pucher’s Othello at Theatertreffen blew his mind and fundamentally changed his approach to directing the classics. How then would he tackle Ibsen’s bleakest plays in one of the capital’s most atmospheric spaces, the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse?
Ghosts is Hill-Gibbins’ first theatre production in the UK since 2018. In 2020, he was appointed artistic director of Headlong at almost the exact moment the UK plunged into lockdown, only to step down a few months later. He has since been directing in Germany and Japan.
His production of Ibsen’s once-reviled Ghosts teeters between intimacy and claustrophobia. Hattie Morahan is superb as a woman still protecting her late husband’s reputation despite the dreadful consequences of his actions for his child(ren). Paul Hilton is perhaps even more impressive, playing Father Manders not as a prissy hypocrite, or not wholly as a prissy hypocrite, but as a man who has a capacity for passion but is also terrified of his own desires. The pair circle each other longingly, lips almost brushing, and Hill-Gibbins mines a lot of laughs from this sad dance (it’s funnier than one might expect of a production featuring life-limiting illness and the prospect of a mother euthanising her own son). Rosanna Vize has carpeted the Sam Wanamaker space in ankle-deep reddish-brown shagpile, through which the cast wade barefoot and which Stuart Thompson’s Oswald often lies face down like a human draft excluder forcing the other characters to walk over and around him. The mirrored backwall multiplies the performers, creepily peopling the space. Hill-Gibbins brings a wooziness to proceedings which doesn’t dilute the tragedy. Never has the snuffing out of candles felt more brutal.
Talking about the Fire - the nuclear question
Chris Thorpe’s latest solo show, cocreated with its director Claire O’Reilly, follows on from previous pieces Status (2018), which explored the concept of nationhood post-Brexit, and Confirmation (2014), about the confirmation bias effects our understanding of the world. It’s also the second show to explore the topic of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to humanity. The other show A Family Business tours the UK and Europe early next year.
Both shows have the same genesis. Having been approached by an elegant Swiss lady in a hotel bar after one of his earlier shows, he learns that she works for the International Committee of the Red Cross and has played a key role in the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which makes it illegal for signatories to develop or store nuclear weapons. With her help, Thorpe continues to immerse himself in this world and he takes us with him on this journey.
He also demonstrates the destructive power of current nuclear weapons, more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by showing us footage of the explosion in the port of Beirut that caused such devastation in 2020 as a visual aid, and using an online tool called Nukemap, which as you can probably imagine, digitally demonstrates the lethality of a nuclear detonation. He uses it to show us what would happen if a nuclear bomb was exploded on the Royal Court.
It's grim stuff, but Thorpe pairs this with an awareness of the audience’s comfort. He hands out biscuits and frequently checks in with us. He asks our names and then uses them, subtly making connections with everyone. The conversational show is performed on a domestic set that basically consists of a rug, a lamp, a pot plant, a kettle and a keyboard, with its implied threat that he will at some point do a song (he does a song).
Thorpe asks us about our favourite places in London (all of which would be gone in an eyeblink if a bomb were to drop). He asks us to construct a safe space in our minds, a space where we would feel comfortable having such uncomfortable conversations. It’s a collective imaginative exercise. Being a firm believer in the idea that theatre can equip you with the tools of resistance, I would have liked more on Greenham Common and CND and the tactics of past activists, but that is to wish for a different show. Thorpe is more concerned with the conversation, with dragging it into our mental foreground.
An interview with Chris Thorpe - “let’s normalise the conversation”
When I last interviewed Chris Thorpe in 2022, he’d just opened A Family Business at Staatstheater Mainz. A co-production with China Plate, it was about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons, and the struggle to make them illegal. Talking to the Fire shares co-producers and some of the same DNA and research with that the show, but they are distinct piece, cousins rather than siblings.
Arguably the shows share the same purpose too: to normalise the conversation around nuclear weapons. “I’m not an expert but I can facilitate conversations about it,” he says.
Late last year the Royal Court held a series of One Night Stands, a space for artists to try out new things. Since Thorpe had only just opened A Family Business, he was “steeped in this world,” so it felt natural to present this material to an audience, albeit in a more improvised, looser and more conversational way. Afterwards he and director Claire O’Reilly both felt: “Fuck – there’s something in this.”
The Royal Court had faith in it, as did the two co-producers. At the heart of Talking About the Fire is a kind of imaginative exercise, an attempt to create a mental space in which to have a difficult but necessary conversation. Thorpe uses the tool of solo performer to explore the collective experience of being in the room together. He hopes the show will help people examine their “relationship to the absence of conversation.”
Nuclear weapons have a “huge gravitational effect on global society.” And yet we do not talk or think about them in the same way we did in recent decades. Growing up in the last years of the Cold War, nuclear terror was prevalent. It leaked off our screens and fuelled our nightmares. “Our media and fictions created thus sense of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Weapons were a way to express that bipolarity,” explains Thorpe.
Since then, society has undergone a process of nuclear “forgetting” (Here’s a fascinating Guardian long read on why this has happened and why it’s not a good thing). This process was probably accelerated by our growing awareness for “how fucked we’ve made the biosphere,” says Thorpe. ”We’re not equipped to deal with multiple existential threats at the same time
While climate crisis is not something we have a choice about, he says, the presence of nuclear weapons in the world is something we can do something about. And need to, given that as the increasing impact of the climate crisis will eventually lead to the use of nuclear weapons – in geopolitical terms, “you don’t need to term up the thermostat any more than it is already.”
“That’s a hard thing to get across,” he says, which is why he works so hard in the show to create a place to absorb these things. He doesn’t want t to scare people, rather to “make people aware they have the agency to make this a normal topic of conversation.”
When he mentions the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons during the show, it’s unusual to have more than three hands go up, but despite this Talking to the Fire is “not an activist show,” nor is its primary goal educative, it’s about this process of normalisation. “There are people out there working on this, but we can help them by normalising the conversation around nuclear weapons.”
A recommendation
“I don’t want to talk with people I already agree with.” Chris Wiegand has written a great piece on Michael De Cock and the work he’s doing at KVS in Brussels for the Guardian. Well worth a read.
This week in European theatre
The Future – In works like Fever and last year’s Crises, the Slovenian director Žiga Divjak has regularly explored the impact of environmental crisis on humanity and the planet. His new show, his first for Belgrade Drama Theatre, continues in this vein. It premieres on 15th December, and I’ll be writing about it - and his work – in more depth next year.
The Masquerades of D. Oregan – The new piece by Yade Yasemin Önder and feminist collective Glossy Pain takes its inspiration from Erdoğan the graphic novel by Can Dündar and Anwar, which explores the early life of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Katharina Stoll – who directed the feminist reframing of Woyzeck I saw earlier in this year in Dresden – helms the production which opens at the Volksbühne in Berlin on 15th December.
Der Untertan - Staying in Berlin, director Christian Weise tackles Heinrich Mann’s novel about the German Empire, though instead of more straightforward adaptation, Weise will be presenting in in ballad form with musician Jens Dohle joining the Maxim Gorki ensemble. It opens on 15th December.
Thanks for reading!
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