Covering four waves of immigration – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews and Bangladeshis – Bean points a flashing neon finger the size of
the Olivier Theatre at our national tendency towards intolerance.

The play does a great job putting the problems of today’s multicultural London in perpsective, as each generation of immigrants eventually integrates into British life and then takes its turn oppressing the next. It’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re still considered a go-to nation for anyone fleeing persecution and adversity.

Yet Bean somehow houses this damning admonishment in an epic, centuries-spanning romantic comedy, throughout which the successive reincarnations of a pair of lovers try again and again to love one another despite cultural divides and running gags. And as if that plot weren’t enough, it is itself embedded in a fairly iffy piece of metatheatre.

The immigrants in the detention centre in 2009, you see, have devised the centuries-spanning romantic comedy while waiting on their applications for leave to remain. At its best, this framing device salts the open wound of British hypocrisy: citizenship exams, testing the loyalty of potential immigrants to the nation that banged them up as soon as they arrived? Such exquisite irony. So quintessentially British.

But the cynic in me can’t help seeing the play-within-a-play as a Get Out Of Jail Free card Bean dealt to himself under the table, allowing him to neatly sidestep criticism with the excuse, “that’s how the characters would have devised it.” And at its worst, the device is a megaphone through which Bean can announce (in case we’re a little slow on the uptake) that it doesn’t matter if a character lives through the Blitz and still looks twenty-five in 2009, because that’s the magic of theatre.

The comedy does work. It tempers the worthier observations and keeps the play from turning into art as social work for the nation. So does the star-cross’d romance. After all, the truest measure of a country’s receptiveness to new cultures is the rate of intermarriage. But I don’t need Olivia Colman’s immigration officer Philippa to face front and tell me so before I can appreciate the point.

Bean could do with worrying a little less about whether people will pick up on his meaning. It’s clear enough without all the highlighting, and in overclarifying himself, he runs the risk of closing down alternative interpretations, yanking the subtext into the foreground and robbing the play of depth.

In search of a new theatre

Portrait of Meyerhold.

In the early 1900s Meyerhold was still involved with symbolist drama but had begun to experiment with specific elements of the stage; improvising with the proscenium and playing with light. In his production of Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth in 1906, he put some of his new techniques to test. The simple but archaic theatre included elements of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, traditional Japanese theatre and characteristics of the old theatres of Spain and England. The most significant development was Meyerhold’s use of a theatre within the theatre, demonstrating the potential of a deliberate display of theatrical illusion. The scenery was non-realistic and sets were raised and lowered in full view of the audience. The Fairground Booth enabled Meyerhold to explore a form which challenged the theatrical conventions from inside the dominant symbolist framework of the day.

The beginnings of Biomechanics

The production of Mikhail Lermontov’s play Masquerade marked a significant step in the development of Meyerhold’s ideas. The decor of the production by Alexander Golovin was designed as an emotional codex which would reflect and in many cases set the mood or atmosphere of the play as it progressed through its various stages. The colours of the curtains and backdrops were designed to lead the viewer from one stage of the production to another so that it became an intricate part of the actors’ performances on stage – highlighting and emphasising their emotional content and psychology. The rising and falling of curtains was not simply a device for opening and closing an act, their graphic input became part of the dramatic process and helped develop the action of the play itself.

The curtains in Masquerade.

To use a musical analogy, the curtains were meant to play the role of an overture with additional orchestral interludes. This was the beginning of breaking up the hierarchy in Russian text-based theatre. Here the abstract graphic element of set design began to play a more equal role in the production as a whole and with this the first seeds were sown of a new acting technique which Meyerhold would name ‘Biomechanics’.

The influence of Constructivist design

Meyerhold’s production of The Magnanimous Cuckold became his boldest experiment in this process. Meyerhold was already developing the acting technique of Biomechanics, a series of exercises to develop and release the emotional potential of the actor through movement. He enlisted Lubov Popova to design a set for the performance. The result was a machine-like moving structure with platforms and whirling wheels against a plain curtain backdrop. The actors’ performances formed a dynamic, pulsating spectacle, moving in unison and integrated with the rhythmic movement of Popova’s constructivist structure. The result was an organic unity on stage between actor and set.

The Man Who Was Thursday Set Drawing.

This production sparked a trend in collaborations with constructivist artists to design theatre sets. The most well known was Alexander Tairov’s production of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday designed by the artist Alexander Vesin. He built a structure with lifts and moving walkways which, it would seem, befitted Chesterton’s literary creation. However the set itself was a disappointment. In many cases it appeared clumsy and actors found it difficult to perform within Vesin’s labyrinth-like and reputedly cumbersome design. Part of the reason why Vesin’s design did not succeed as intended is because the implications of Meyerhold’s innovations had not been entirely understood. The structure was abstract and constructivist in character, but it was also a fairly concrete object and in some sense representational and functional. It was a space in which actors could interact with each other and a world which bore resemblances to emerging forms of the time. In some sense a return to naturalism, albeit of a contemporary or constructivist/urban/industrialist character.

Popova’s Machine

Popova’s machine was completely different in character. It was machine-like but far from the common structures of the day. In present day terms we might refer to it as an installation. It was abstract, it blurred meaning, and had no function other than to be an object in the production. This suited Meyerhold’s desire for the crossing and re-crossing of the borders between tragedy and comedy, pathos and farce and hence embodied his experimentation with theatrical form.

Popova's Machine in production.

The blurring and crossing of borders can be found in Japanese artistic and theatrical forms; as can the emptiness of the stage which like a monotone Japanese landscape painting depends on what is taken out, giving the audience a chance to use their own imagination to fill the void. In this sense, while wanting to stimulate and lead an audience, Meyerhold did not want to control their emotions.

Popova's Machine poster.

Meyerhold’s interest in Japan

To further understand these developments in Russian theatre, it’s important to note Meyerhold’s interest in the traditional performing arts of Japan, particularly Kabuki and Noh. One of the principal characteristics of Noh, and a paradox in a theatre of masks, is that the theatrical process is “unmasked” in full view of the audience. Stage technology is revealed and incorporated into the “work of art”, so that the process becomes an important medium for preserving and relaying information about the play.

Scene from a Noh theatre production of Okina Hōnō.

This appealed to Meyerhold who proceeded to turn his theatre inside out, rejecting the play as an art form wholly based on text. The theatre that Meyerhold wanted demanded a new type of actor with a new style of acting, and Kabuki with its emphasis on dance and physical movement served Meyerhold’s purposes well. The rhythm of dance was important to the futurists and avant-garde artists because through rhythm a new life could be presented and a new type of person would embody this rhythm for a new future era where movement speed and dynamism were optimum. Biomechanics with its visual/graphic potential was meant to be a living synthesis of this transformation.

A ‘return’ to classical drama?

By the time Meyerhold put on his version of The Government Inspector it was heralded by the authorities as Meyerhold’s return to classical drama. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkompros) had earlier criticised Meyerhold’s experiments but welcomed Meyerhold’s return to traditional theatre. However, looking at the photographs and designs of this production the innovations which Meyerhold had pioneered were still apparent. Meyerhold had not abandoned his experiments and they continued to inform his work as much as before. As he himself commented, “Just because we are not rushing about the stage waving red flags does not mean that theatre is not revolutionary”.

Mannequins in the making.

Moreover the revolutionary quality of the production was borne out with Meyerhold borrowing techniques from cinema. In some scenes, several events take place simultaneously and the action spills over from one side of the stage into the other in a torrent of movement uncharacteristic of earlier classical productions. Meyerhold went even further. In the final scene where actors are required to freeze in still poses to dramatise the ossified and static nature of the world portrayed in the production, Meyerhold substituted the actors with specially designed mannequins.

Mannequins in Meyerhold's production of The Government Inspector.

The graphic quality is unmistakable with echoes from Bunraku (puppet theatre of Japan) puppets and the dramatic poses or mie of Kabuki actors. Meyerhold’s vision was bold and radical in its strong integration of the graphic component into the production and emphasises his ability to transcend the boundaries of theatrical form. In this case, instead of real people playing the role of frozen mannequins, real mannequins played the role of people. Whatever Meyerhold’s intention, watching rows of lifelike figures gaze into the auditorium, transformed like idols from an another era, must have made for an eerie climax.

I quite liked the fact that Jason’s Argonauts were dressed like something out of Blake’s 7. I quite liked the comedy footy match played out between opposing armies (with both taking dives). I liked the whirl of ribbons and lights that took us to a marketplace in Medea’s vaguely South American homeland. I was game for a sing-along and a play-along and a dance. I even joined in to the extent of confirming my suspicions that professional handmaidening must be a pretty tedious job. But what I really couldn’t stand was the officious and incessant pestering of supposedly ‘hidden’ actors who made up a sizeable portion of the alleged ‘audience’.

These egregious nuisances – easy to spot because they know the words to the songs – were evidently under the impression that their job was to chivvy and/or bully the rest of us into compliant communal enthusiasm. I tried as hard as I could to lurk among the non-joiners, politely embarrassed, like the kid at a party who’d rather read a book. Unfortunately for me, my persecutors weren’t taking the hint.

If I want to do dance-aerobics in the middle of the night – well I don’t. But if I did, the idea that my goodwill might be engaged by much grabbing of my hand and vigorous shoving in the ribs (some of which actually hurt) seems pretty far-fetched. I’m prepared to believe that no-one meant to offend me (and certainly not hurt me), but this over-zealous evangelism left me grinding my teeth, thinking vaguely vengeful thoughts and longing for a way out.

In all fairness, the last four hours of this marathon all-nighter may well have been amazing. There were certainly hints that events might be about to take a turn for the darker, with a bloody-mouthed Medea wandering through a dramatically-lit rave, dispatching her brothers/bodyguards/army in her overpowering passion for Jason. I’m afraid I’ll never know – having escaped at 2am, bruised, exhausted – and with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Participatory theatre is hard. Especially when the audience don’t want to play ball. But I remain to be convinced that relentless pestering, emotional blackmail and the odd physical shove onto the dancefloor is the answer. There are many engaging and entertaining and striking things about Hotel Medea, all sadly undermined the amateurishly aggressive attitude of certain participants towards innocent, and justifiably underwhelmed punters. Upon mature reflection – maybe I should have taken my grandma.