Guram Qartvelishvili has unearthed and assembled material suppressed during the Soviet regime to create an epic play about Georgia’s struggle for freedom – naturally a very loaded subject in light of Georgia’s recent war with Russia over South Ossetia (August 2008). Against this backdrop, the historic 1920’s Soviet plans for settling the newly formed region of Ossetia, and eventually the rest of Georgia, with Russian military personnel was particularly poignant, since many Georgians see these forced re-settlements as the root of the recent conflict.

For this performance, the Marjanishvili’s large stage was used to its fullest extent, revealing a marvellous depth very appropriate to the panoramic scope of the events. The overall design was simple but effective. Moveable and tiltable platforms provided great flexibility and brought to life scenes as diverse as a lovers’ bed to the cold heights of the Battle of Sarikamish.

The acting matched this sweeping patriotic view of history in its use of pathos. The cast, with Kakutsa Cholokashvili (Nika Tavadze) as lead role, created a Hollywoodesque performance in the style of Doctor Zhivago, full of passion, male camaraderie, and heroic warfare. Gia Burjanadze was especially convincing as a burdened but responsible Marshall Kote Abkhazi. The Soviet commander’s hunchbacked servant Avksenti (Alexander Getsadze) with his gluttonous craving for food was also very memorable and added a much-needed element of humour to the piece.

The overall style of heightened naturalism combined with patriotic fervour was challenging at times for a non-Georgian audience more accustomed to psychological acting, but it was effective in what it tried to achieve. The problems of this approach lie in its consequences on the interpretation of the story. I found the aestheticisation of war through the use of heroic tableaux washed in a blue light problematic in the way it glossed over the atrocities of the armed conflicts. Even the on-stage fights were oddlly tame and insufficiently choreographed. With the recent August war in mind, such glorification of personal sacrifice can turn out to be a very dangerous call-to-arms. Given the country’s history, statements like ‘struggle always has meaning’ are understandable, but deserve closer scrutiny all the same. Not short on visual and emotional effects, it is this lack of critical thinking that stands out as a large gap in this production of Kakutsa Cholokashvili.

This production of Kakutsa Cholokashvili was reviewed on the 23/11/08 at the Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi, large stage.

Photograph-top: Portrait of Kakutsa Cholokashvili around the time of the conflict in 1921. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Photograph-bottom: Kakutsa Cholokashvili prodcution at the Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi, large stage

The plot is simple: Upper-class lady Mme Lemarchand (Fiona Bell) visits the handyman Franck Meyer in order to hire his wife Hilda as nanny and maid. From the beginning, there are hidden implications that her real intention is to sleep with Franck – implications that were unfortunately spelled out only too largely in this production.

In Fiona Bell’s delivery, Mme Lemarchand’s sexual voraciousness, driven by a feeling of power and superiority, is continuously visible. Moreover, Bell’s performance starts at a high and hysteric pitch and remains on that level throughout the evening, thus precluding any further emotional development or even tonal nuances. This makes it difficult to follow her arguments – a serious defect given the discursive nature of Ndiaye’s script. It stands to question whether director and cast have fully penetrated the French tradition of the argumentative dialogic play. If performed in this way, it certainly emerges as a weakness, giving the impression of a lack of theatricality and an unbalanced predominance of language.

Franck’s (Merlin Leonhardt’s) performance was similarly one-dimensional. After having hired Hilda (who, by the way, is never seen on stage), Mme Lemarchand begins to invade their private space, and estranges Hilda step by step from her husband, to the point of coaxing the absent character to live in her house. Leonhardt expresses Franck’s emotional and later physical pain by being bent double most of the time, and usually plays with a rather vacant look supposedly meant to express the magnitude of his emotional suffering.

Tea Kitsmarishvili as Franck’s sister-in-law Carine was the one discovery of the evening. Her portrayal of a feisty and caring character willing to take over her sister’s responsibilities with her family was completely convincing. In contrast to the other actors, it was a relief to see Kitsmarishvili’s restraint (a curious reversal of the difference between a generally heightened Georgian style in comparison to the more psychological British one). Emotions registered on her face, but she was not thrusting herself on the audience. Instead, her character was more concerned in getting on with her life.

And that is exactly what Franck and Carine end up doing: they accept Hilda’s total appropriation by Mme Lemarchand and decide to build a new existence out of the scraps of their former lives. This strikes me as the most interesting aspect of a play that otherwise – as text and production – seems to be curiously limited in scope.

All characters in the piece are played by finger puppets clad in the most basic of costumes and cunningly lit to create the right level of focus and intimacy. The company uses three different types of puppets. The first is a sort of show presenter/emcee, a bag-shaped creature with a moveable mouth. This character would certainly please a younger audience, but to me it delivered little more than mild amusement. The second type of puppet was more engaging. Its head was of a similar design to characters from the Muppet Show and its body was created by a human hand: the index and middle fingers served as legs while the thumb and the ring finger formed its arms. The third type also used the puppeteer’s hand to create the shape of the body but added a small and simple egg-shaped wooden head that possessed a nose but no eyes. This proved to be the most touching of all the puppets.

There’s something amazing about watching a hand transform into a fully-fledged (albeit silent) character, all the more vulnerable for the visibility of the puppeteer’s naked skin. The gestures delivered by these finger puppets was of a simplicity and precision that is often lacking in human actors; and it brought home some of Kleist’s ideas in his famous essay On the Marionette Theatre. Dancing to the music, two finger puppets come together and separate, experience close physical encounters, and are finally given wings (created by another actor’s wide-spread hands) to fly away together.

The Fingers Theatre’s performance is full of the kind of rhythmic precision that was so clearly lacking in Tsuladze’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I began watching earlier on in the evening. Overall, the performance was a bit too long for my taste, but that is more the original video’s fault than a failure on the part of the company. After my initial disappointment with performances in Georgia, Fingers Theatre certainly improved my hopes for the days ahead!

The Fingers Theatre production took place on the 22/11/08 at the Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi (small stage).

To watch a video clip of the Fingers Theatre’s adaptation of Bizet’s opera Carmen visit this link.

Outside on the steps of St Paul’s I gave a quick compulsive glance at my phone. I happened across a stranger’s twitter message that read: “Sad about Pinter. What an amazing man.” The BBC’s website soon confirmed the rest and once again I found myself contemplating nature’s old duality of life and death. Christ is born and Pinter is dead.

I followed the Thames for a while, thinking how gray the National Theatre looks by day, then up past Middle Temple towards the Royal Courts of Justice. Turning the corner of the Strand, I saw a young man asleep in a shop doorway. There was a bright red box by his side, a gift that he’d yet to lay eyes on. “Justice” read the Royal Courts’ plaque across the street. I passed on by, but the young man’s face continued to prey on my mind.

He got me thinking of Harold Pinter, of an article I’d read in the Scotsman about a production of The Caretaker at the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow. The director Philip Breen spoke in the article of Pinter’s ‘affinity with the character of the vagrant’ (Davies); underlining the fact that at the time of writing the play, Pinter ‘was living in poverty, in rented rooms, with his new wife, Vivien Merchant, and with his baby son, Daniel, at his feet.’ Connections were beginning to form and I remembered the words of Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy who spoke of Pinter uncovering ‘the precipice of everyday prattle’ in his plays. It struck me how frequently we stand at such fault lines and how infrequently we respond to our dismay. The theatre has been the great mouthpiece of dismay and yet too few of its proponents carry their bile beyond the comfort of its four walls.

Later that evening, I read through some of the early obituaries and eulogies pouring in from around the Web. Under this cascade of memory and accolade I thought about the extent to which Pinter’s work had left marks on the landscape of my own theatre experience. From recent productions I’d seen to past readings and academic interventions, it is Pinter’s pen turned scapel that attracted me to his work. Through language and its absence, it was his ability to carve incisions into the humanity right there at home and to reveal unnerving, chilling and often laughable insights, but never without an underlying sense of morality. For any student, professional or afficionado of theatre, Pinter’s influence is undeniable, indelible, and his legacy will be treasured.

To end these thoughts on this cold, clear day in London, I’m attaching two videos that provide windows onto this playwright’s great oeuvre. The first is an interview from 2006 with the North American broadcast journalist Charlie Rose, discussing Pinter’s performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre in 2006. The second is a recording of Pinter’s much celebrated Nobel Prize speech entitled ‘Art, Truth and Politics’.

Charlie Rose interviews Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter Nobel Prize for Literature Speech: ‘Art, Truth and Politics’

Photograph Top: Harold Pinter in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Roycal Court Theatre in 2006. Photograph courtesy of Wikipedia.

The presentations opened with a new adaptation of the Shakespeare classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Marjanishvili’s Artistic Director Levan Tsuladze. Tsuladze’s vision of the play is a pink and white extravaganza dominated by the development of a gay relationship between Oberon and Puck. The fairies, dressed in skimpish ballet dresses, inspired by Art Nouveau design, are representative of a Victorian prettification which culminates in an extravagant Botticelli pastiche when Titania emerges from a giant mussel.

The acting generally betrays the Georgian predilection for the grand old English style a la Olivier, which would appear to a modern London audience as heightened and bordering on the melodramatic. However, Tsuladze’s direction is not completely void of postmodern impulses. Some of the large theatrical gestures are ironically undercut, for example when Oberon calls thunder and lightning upon a character and is then surprised by the immediate effect of his gesture.

The use of space is often uninspired. Most monologues are expectedly delivered to the audience from the front of the stage, and during Theseus’ and Egeus’ negotiation of Hermia’s relationship with Lysander, all participants limply stand in a single line.

This lack of thorough thinking is unfortunately indicative of the rest of the performance. Many ideas and situations are created without following them through to their end. The only possible exception is the introduction of a female Snug (Nika Kuchava) into the group of mechanicals. Snug’s insistence on a part in the play they are going to enact for Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s wedding, reinforced as it is by Kuchava’s boisterous impersonation, is suddenly imbued with feminist implications. Unfortunately, even this potential female empowerment leads to a dead end when Snug is ready to settle for the minor part of the lion.

The production becomes a meandering plot that lacks a clear thrust. Attempts are made to fill this intellectual emptiness with music that does little else than reinforce the desired (and obvious) emotions of a scene. The production fails to rise beyond a titillating Disneyfication of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I left at the interval in order to attend a rather different performance.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed at the Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi, large stage on 22/11/08.

Read the first part of Jens Peters’ Georgia Series: The Rendezvous.

Sam Gayton’s drama is a nicely judged mixture of woeful and haunting and silly. A bedtime story stolen from Plato, complete with shadow puppets and philosophical musings, immediately gives way to something suspiciously like a good old fashioned kitchen slosh scene. Michael Bryher’s production moves between profundity and daftness with ease, and with an infectious sympathy for the frailties and follies that make us human. Asa Norling’s inventive set gives the company a magical world to play in , a rambling make-believe castle beneath a marvellous starlit sky. And the whole story is suffused with Rollo Clarke’s understated, romantic and poignant piano score.

The show’s large ensemble is brimming with energy, and while some of the characters, though picturesque, seem to lack purpose, they are all played with absolute commitment. Hester Bond’s Sophie flits with humour and uncloying sweetness through the memories and dreams of the family she left behind. As the ballerina doll who aspires to fill her place, Rachel King ripples uncannily through her dances in a devastatingly precise, off-kilter approximation of an absent, idealised daughter. Jack Lowe’s Clockheart Boy is a wide-eyed wild-haired gamin, saved from soppiness by a convincing streak of mischief. And Lotte Allan as Peepers visibly develops from a witness of others’ tragedies to the grown-up heroine of her own story.

The play eschews the obvious fairy tale ending in favour of the dawning realisation that some lost things can never be found. Clockheart Boy may look like just a kids’ show, with all the madcap paraphernalia of the genre, but there’s a lot of sophisticated thinking going on behind its endearingly ramshackle veneer.

Clockheart Boy is at the Cochrane Theatre until 21 December, and then tours: www.dumbshow.org

Photograph: Clockheart Boy and the Ballerina (played by Jack Lowe and Rachel king).

Guiver’s Kay is a thoughtful portrait of unlovely adolescence, gangly and self-centred and utterly enraptured by new intellectual discoveries that transform the contours of his imaginings. His fixation with the mathematical perfection of snowflakes draws him away from Pearcey’s touching, baffled Gerda into the Snow Queen’s ice-bound realm, where he discovers that all his equations are unequal to the problem of recapturing childhood certainties.

Gerda’s perilous quest to rescue her lost playmate is the cue for multiple quick changes, some wonderful object manipulation and a lot of hard work from a cast of four. However, the sometimes pretty but often banal songs do nothing to keep the story moving, or add depth to some hastily sketched characterisations. The style of the storytelling lurches uncomfortably between scenes, and much of the devised dialogue drags, while some beautiful sequences of near-silent physical performance go completely over the heads of younger audience members, for want of a few words of explanation.

In the latter stages of the show, the company achieve some wonders on a shoestring: spiky gothic vistas conjured by a puppet witch, snowflakes hanging eerily in the air, a breathless reindeer ride across the snows of Lapland, and Gerda’s pilgrimage through frozen mountains accompanied by the keening strains of the harmonium. An unsatisfyingly abrupt ending squanders the emotional power of the children’s eventual reunion. But The Snow Queen, despite its oddities and structural flaws, is an intermittently magical winter journey.

The Snow Queen is at the New Wimbledon Studio until 11 January 2009: www.seethesnowqueen.com

Photograph: Ana Mirtha Gutiérrez as Gerda in The Snow Queen. Photograph by Mike Faranden.

Tamara Bartaia’s new play is based on true events that took place during the Georgian civil war of 1991-1993. The action is set in a graveyard in Tbilisi in 1998. Led by a beggar-cum-narrator (James Bye), the audience encounters the ghosts of the young victims of the recent conflict. Timo (Alex Price), Kakha (Michael Norledge), Nik (Daniel McCloud), Lexo (Joseph Thompson) and Besso (Ben Upson) were a young band of idealistic revolutionaries who saw themselves as the re-embodiment of the ‘Horsemen’ from a mythical chivalric past. However, their death has left them disillusioned, and now they are intent on solving one final question: why? Why did they have do die? Who betrayed them? Could it have been their senior charismatic leader Juansher (Tim Wyatt), as the rumour would have them believe?

In the course of the evening, The Rendezvous reveals a world devoid of idealism, in which only mutual distrust is left. While the ghosts of the revolutionaries are busy elucidating the past, the present is represented by the visiting friends and widows: Ana and Eka (both played by Laura Main), and Natia Rebecca and Salome (played by Jo Hanbury). These are the representatives left in the real world, the world outside the graveyard, who have to deal with the repercussions of the civil war, where ‘yesterday’s heroism’ is easily mistaken for ‘today’s crimes’.

The stage design realizes this essential divide succinctly: the graveyard is represented by a single slab cordoned off by ropes that could also be a speaker’s podium. The ghosts of the dead are nearly exclusively inside these confines, while the living come from outside to commemorate them. This symbolic separation of space serves the play’s complexity well as it operates on several levels. It embodies a deeper division of the country, running along the lines of political factions, but also rooted in the clash of a dense history with the geopolitical demands of the modern world. The recent war with Russia brought Georgia’s self-image to the fore once more; and one possible image is that of a beleaguered island, very much like the solitary graveyard on stage.

The play certainly profits most from these complex implications for today’s political situation in the Caucasus. On the other hand, the intimate demands of both space and writing are not served by the acting. Director Hilary Wood fails to curb a general tendency to express emotional intensity through a plethora of facial and gestural mannerisms. Particularly the Beggar (James Bye) tries too hard to ingratiate himself with the audience during his direct addresses. The female characters, but above all Timo (Alex Price) are a delightful exception to the rule. Price succeeds to communicate a Hamlet-like scepticism and disgust at exsistence in his contained, introverted performance, which is subtle enough to work in the small Drayton Studio. Sometimes a slightly quivering lip says more than a whole bag of actors’ tricks.

It is worth noting that two Gerogian productions La Ronde and Hilda (a review of which will feature in this series) will be on at the Arcola Theatre in late December and early January.

There are very few professional theatre critics in the UK, by which I mean people that earn a living from theatre criticism alone. Of those few, the vast majority are of what most people like to call ‘a certain age’. I knew this before attending the discussion; as a young person working in the field of arts journalism, it has a direct effect on my life. What I hadn’t considered was the effect it has on the evolution of theatre journalism as a form.

The small cadre of professional critics was represented on the panel by Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Telegraph. From the off, Spencer declared himself openly hostile towards theatre bloggers. He accused the blogosphere of watering down critical discourse with a morass of uninformed opinion, and claimed that same morass would soon put him and his colleagues out of their jobs.

Spencer labelled his hostility “a generational problem”, and admitted that he simply didn’t like computers and technology. He also labelled himself “the last of the Luddites”; unfortunately, this epithet is not as accurate. His contemporaries are, if anything, older and more set in their ways than he is. Which means the most powerful portion of the critical establishment wants nothing to do with new media.

How is criticism supposed to evolve and find a place in the media as it exists today, if its biggest names think blogging is the enemy?

Not everyone in the industry is resistant to the change new media offers. Andrew Dickson, arts editor for the Guardian Online, was also a panellist. The Guardian have been quicker than their competitors to embrace online content. But the publication still follows the formats and processes of print journalism. Dickson commissions reviews, blog posts and podcasts or videos in the same way as his print counterparts.

No one has yet fully grasped the potential of new media. No one has fully exploited the combined power of online journalism, podcasting, social networking and mobile synchronisation. I still structure my reviews for London Theatre Blog the same way I would for a print publication. But if the critical community is held back by an older generation with a lot of clout and no love for web 2.0, by the time we get there technology will have moved ahead of us again.

In some ways perhaps it already has. Wired magazine declared the death of blogging in October, and the theatre industry still has yet to fully acknowledge its legitimacy. Whether or not the problem is generational, there is indisputably a problem: technology moves fast, and we’re being left behind.

Brickbats in Cyberspace took place at the Royal Court Theatre on Monday 1 December 2008. The event was braodcast live online and here is the full audio archive of the event.

The participants were as follows:

Chair:
Karen Fricker, critic for Variety magazine and lecturer in Theatre Criticism at Royal Holloway university

Panellists:
Andrew Dickson, arts editor for guardian.co.uk
Judith Dimant, producer for Complicite
Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Daily Telegraph
The West End Whingers, theatre bloggers

Tombstone Tales is a graveyard cabaret, part ballad-opera, part burlesque and part clown show. Writer and director Carl Heap has made a cadavers’ vaudeville that focuses on the lives (and deaths) of the unglamorous and unsung of the American Old West. There’re shadow puppets, magic tricks, folk dances, a motley array of accents, cowboys, bandits, apaches and a masacree – but (despite the presence of Wyatt Earp and his brothers) not the gunfight at (or near) the OK Corral. Miriam Nabarro’s set is shabbily atmospheric, and its saloon bar and stage give the boisterous cast acres of space to muck around in. Heap’s rhyming verses and Joe Townsend’s score jog along with inventive homespun charm and morbidly wicked black humour.

This show made me laugh out loud, the company are talented and tireless, and The Song of Gold Dollar is worth the price of admission in itself. The latter stories are more sombre, with the poignantly pathological tale of The Golden Stairs, and even a suspicion of a socially-relevant moral. But if you thought that what The Masque of the Red Death lacked was a cross-dressed bar-room catfight, then you’re in for a treat with Tombstone Tales. It’s an uncommon and outlandish festive offering, fusing audience participation and sing-along with a light-heartedly lugubrious tour through the forgotten grave-dwellers of Tombstone. Check your guns at the door, grab a glass of sipping liquor, pull up a chair, and enjoy.

Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads is at the Arcola Theatre until 20 December.