London round-up: Cowbois, A Mirror and Ola Ince's Othello
I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
Last week I was in London, primarily for The Stage Awards, but also to catch up on work, more of which below. I also recently interviewed Rimini Protokoll’s Stefan Kaegi about This is Not an Embassy (Made in Taiwan), a typically fascinating piece of documentary theatre in which they attempted to create an 'impossible' Taiwanese embassy inside a theatre, which opened at Haus der Berliner Festspiele at the end of January.
Cowbois - “a queertopia”
Back in 2018, I interviewed actor and playwright Charlie Josephine ahead of their performance as Mercutio in Erica Whyman’s production of Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. We talked a lot about gender and the gaze, about occupying the stage in a female body. Josephine, who now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns (though this wasn’t the case when I interviewed them), hoped that their playing Mercutio would “provoke discussion about the boxes we put ourselves in.”
Their new show for the Royal Shakespeare Company - which Josephine has described as a “queertopia” - is all about the boxes we put ourselves - or are put - in. Cowbois is a kind of fantasia set in the American West, though the setting is more of a colourful play-space in which to explore – and have fun with – themes of gender expression. This is a dressing-up box western, a feeling accentuated by Grace Smart’s poppy fringe-bedecked costumes.
Cowbois is set in a one-horse town where all the men save for the permanently inebriated sheriff are away prospecting leaving their womenfolk alone and bored, with little to occupy their days except half-hearted chat about the new preacher until swaggering outlaw Jack Cannon (Vinnie Heaven) strolls into town with their dapper outfits and gleaming smile. Jack radiates charm and, naturally, the townswomen, including saloon owner Miss Lillian (Sophie Melville), sit up and pay attention.
The show is co-directed by Josephine and Sean Holmes, who is currently associate artistic director at the Globe and someone who knows how to stage a comic set-piece. But for all the musical numbers (because, of course, there’s an onstage band) and the gunfights, the visual highlight is a genuinely steamy bathtub scene between Heaven and Melville in which the pair give each other permission to explore each other’s bodies. It’s a scene of consent and respect and is all the hotter for it.
The rest of the cast has clearly also understood the brief, from a relatively restrained Lucy McCormick, an endearingly warm Paul Hunter as the sozzled sheriff who enjoys the feel of a bit of silk on his skin, to newcomer Lee Braithwaite as farmhand Lucy who takes one look at Jack and sheds their skirts with relief to become Lou. Melville (as anyone who saw the incredible Iphigenia in Splott knows, has one of the best cry-faces in the business) is captivating as Miss Lillian and Heaven is every inch the dashing hero; one easily believes that their desire for one another is such that it might over-ride biology.
While the first half is zesty and kinetic, the show loses momentum in the second half, with the inevitable return on the men to their newly liberated town. For reasons that aren’t 100% clear, Jack is packed off for a good part of this second section and the women are left to deal with the displeasure of the returning men, who are baffled to see their sheriff sober and their women doing just fine without them. Fortunately LJ Parkinson is on hand to liven things up, playing a green-haired, bounty hunter called One-Eyed-Charley with real panto villain panache.
Having been originally staged by the RSC, the production was parachuted into the Royal Court in London when a previously planned production fell through and it’s one of the most straight-up fun productions to be performed in the building in a while, the actors dashing around the stage like kids on a sugar high, firing cap guns at each other and generally having a blast.
While the show as a whole is sometimes too on-the-nose and essentially jeopardy-less, that’s part of its charm. It is infectiously joyous. The production brings to mind other narratives of gender non conformity in the American west - Johnny Guitar, Calamity Jane – as well as the polyamorous curio musical Paint Your Wagon. It also felt at times like a trans masc twist on films like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, with dapper Jack acting as a key, unlocking the hidden desires of the townspeople, releasing - and affirming - their secret selves.
A Mirror - an idea machine
It’s impossible to discuss Sam Holcroft‘s new play A Mirror without revealing some of its twists and rug-pulls. When we enter the theatre, the stage is set for a wedding. There are balloons, fairy lights and orders of service on every chair which inform us we’re here to celebrate the union of Joel and Leyla. But, as rapidly becomes apparent, this is just a cover. We’re really here to watch a play, to witness a piece of theatre, though the authorities could burst in at any moment and arrest everyone.
A Mirror was inspired at least in part by trips Holcroft took to North Korea and to Beirut, the latter as part of the Royal Court International Department writers’ programme, where she met writers from Lebanon and Syria. “ I wanted to give the audience the tiniest taste of what it might be like to attend a forbidden play in an authoritarian regime,” she said in this Guardian interview.
Holcroft’s previous play Rules for Living was about a family Christmas in which the characters’ behaviour was governed by unspoken rules underlining their every interaction. She’s a writer who clearly likes textual layers and plays-within-plays. Something similar is going on in A Mirror, which opened last year at the Almeida before transferring to the West End.
Adem (Samuel Adewunmi), a car mechanic, has submitted a play to the censor’s office, where it’s come to the attention of deputy culture minister Jan Čelik (Jonny Lee Miller). He invites Adem to his office where he, Čelik and his assistant Mei (Tanya Reynolds), perform an (amusingly awkward) reading of the play, which documents in detail the lives of the various sex workers and alcoholics who live in his building, the conversations he hears through his paper-thin walls. Essentially a piece of verbatim theatre, the play captures the unvarnished reality of life in the unspecified country in which the play is set. While this renders the play unstageable from a censorship perspective, Čelik thinks Adem shows promise as a dramatist and offers him guidance in how to grow as a writer, albeit in a state-sanctioned manner.
Adem’s response is to turn the conversation he and Čelik have about his work into a play and re-submit it. This process is then repeated, with Holcroft’s writing turning in ever tighter circles, the form generating questions about the purpose of art, about escapism, truth and authenticity. The characters end up performing two versions of a piece of propaganda theatre about a key battle (because whichever country we’re in is also at war), one written by the swaggering Bax (Geoffrey Streatfeild), the regime’s most feted playwright who has never replicated the youthful success of his debut, the other written by Adem, who was part of the battalion and saw what really happened.
On the one hand, this is a play as much about the act of creation as it is about the role of artists in an authoritarian regime. It’s about the pressures placed on a writer to confirm to certain structural demands, to meet certain narrative expectations; as my friend commented in the pub afterwards, the ‘regime’ in question might just as well be Netflix.
While I enjoyed the more thought experiment-y first half with its fluid, funny writing and shades of Ismail Kadare’s Ministry of Dreams, once the play escapes the confines of Čelik’s office, it loses its way. The frame of the play, with officials interrupting to check paperwork thus obliging us to pick up the pretence that we are at a wedding, keeps reasserting itself and the more literal it becomes, the less satisfying it is as theatre.
I found myself thinking of Counting Sheep, an immersive piece about the 2014 Maidan revolution which originally played Edinburgh in 2017 and then came to London in 2019 when it wasn’t just reworked but completely transformed by Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin into a visceral, disorientating experience which (briefly) made you feel what it was like to get swept up in events. Obviously, they know a thing or two about making theatre underground and the very real risks involved, and I kept wondering what a version of this play directed by them might feel like.
Jeremy Herrin’s production can only just wink at this in a way that feels timid and a bit silly. The play is set in a hazy non-specific regime with two-headed eagles crests on the walls and references to the Motherland in the oath of allegiance we are obliged to read out. Even though, as the production repeatedly points out, we are spitting distance from the seat of government in the UK, there’s no real sense of danger or subversion – and Herrin’s attempts to generate this feel, at best, a bit clunky. As a result it remains a puzzle-box play, an all-too-clean idea machine rather than a theatrical experience that engages the gut.
Othello - doubling up
Ola Ince’s last production at the Globe was a Brechtian take on Romeo and Juliet that focussed on the crisis of mental health in young people and did not shy away from depicting the lovers’ death by suicide as brutal and messy. The decision to provide audiences with the number of the Samaritans suicide prevention hotline caused certain section of the UK media to have a collective pant-wetting, even though this is something that television drama has been doing for decades.
Ince’s new production of Othello in the intimate Sam Wanamaker Playhouse sets the play within the Metropolitan Police, an organisation still dealing with institutional racism and misogyny within its ranks. Othello (Ken Nwosu) is now a chief inspector, but his rank doesn’t immunise him from the racism that still permeates the force (snatches of which we hear over police radio). It’s a strong concept, which Ince lacing the text with cop talk ‘Guv’nor’ and other modern embellishments; Desdemona (Poppy Gilbert) is referred to as a “Chelsea girl” or just “Dezzie” for short, while Oli Higginson’s Cassio is an Eton-educated posh boy adding class into the mix motivating Ralph Davis’ simmering, more working class-coded Iago.
Ince also gives Nwosu’s Othello a shadow self, a physical embodiment of his psyche. The performer Ira Mandela Siobhan writhes around Nwosu, his body spasming, his backing arching. He’s every submerged impulse, every swallowed sigh of frustration. Sometimes he’s a Chaplin-esque presence, sometimes a more graceful entity; sometimes he physically grapples with Othello, while at other times the pair come together, speaking in tandem, two bodies, one voice.
It’s a fascinating device, reminiscent of Shared Experience’s take on Jane Eyre, in which the mad woman in the attic doubles as young Jane’s rebellious spirit. The problem here is that adding this psychological alter ego into an already high-concept production leaves the whole thing feeling uncomfortably over-extended. The use of the Met setting has so much potential, but the candlelit Sam Wanamaker space feels like a really weird fit for this explicitly contemporary production. The different elements struggle to cohere and it never feels as pointed in its critique of the police as, say, Tom Basden’s recent update of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist which paired broad farce with barely contained fury about recent deaths in police custody and even directed its audience to relevant campaigns.
Nwosu – fantastic in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon and Suzan Lori-Parks’ White Noise – is compelling as a man practised at internalising his frustration and pushing everything deep down inside. The double concepts dovetail in the scene of Desdemona’s death, as she lies curled in her coracle of a bed surrounded by candles. Othello must also extinguish a part of himself as he snuffs out her light, his alter ego struggling with all his might to stay his hand. In the end, a broken Nwosu speaks the line “I hate the Moor.”
If the rest of the production had the impact of these scene, it would have been quite something but too often, ironically, it feels like a production wrestling with itself.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other exciting upcoming events over the next seven days.
Summer Guests - Regular Theatertreffen selectee Stefan Pucher directs Dietmar Dath’s update of the 1904 play by Maxim Gorky about a group of bourgeoise friends who retreat to the mountains for a digital detox. It premieres at Theatre Basel on 7th February.
When the Snow Melts – The past projects of director Katarzyna Minkowska and her regular collaborator Tomasz Walesia include Orlando, Bloomsbury, about the life of Virgina Woolf. Their new show takes the form of a familial saga about a tragedy which brings several generations of a family back home and back together. It opens at TR Warszava on 9th February.
Bad Kingdom – Playwright and director Falk Richter returns to the Schaubühne for a slippery-sounding new piece which uses fragmented scenes to explore and question the nature of reality – and what we’re watching. (Maybe. Even the blurb is hard to pin down). It premieres in Berlin on 11h February.
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