The Best job in the world

JAN.20.2013 -

Ronald Bryden had the best job; I met him as a student at the Drama Centre in the University of Toronto.  He has just arrived from England where he was “a play adviser “ (he didn’t call it a dramaturge)  for the Royal Shakespeare theatre. He explained that his job was to help the director and the cast to understand the play and the characters in the context of its time and culture. I have never heard of such a job, but knew that it was indeed the best job on earth. . In   Bryden's   course we put up a production of The Marquis of Keith by Frank Wedekind. This was the same play that he did with the Royal Shakespeare. We certainly enjoyed his expertise as we knew nothing about Wedekind and Munich at the beginning of the tentieth century.  As students we were happy to spend  endless hours  on the play, getting to know Wedekind  and his era through the exciting tutelage of Bryden. However,  “real”  actors don’t have that time  and a good literary advisor provides them  a useful short-cut.

I don’t know how many theatres still employ serious play advisers; from my experience,  not many.  When the budget is tight literary research seems like a luxury. But the absence of that nowledge leads to a limited understanding of the play and results in a mediocre and superficial productions. It is not a problem with the classics, the Greeks and Shakespeare, as there is a body of knowledge and a long tradition of producing them. But the ignorance is obvious when producing  a contemporary translated play, a recnt play from  previous generations  or from a different but familiar culture. When the distance between the two cultures seems small the play could be read  as transparent, this  reading is insufficient,  partial and results in a superficial and empty production.  A good example of ignorance of the context of a play was the production of The History Boys  by Alan Bennett which I saw in Israel. It wasn’t only because of the Hebrew, I have watched many great translated productions. Rather, I believe that the director felt that the play was clear and was not aware of the complex issues hidden in the text. Thus the richness of the text that  had to do with the class system, private all boys education system and the subtle homosexual cultural subtext, fell flat.

In today’s world perhaps we don’t need  play advisrs anymore, the knowledge is  available and accessible if the director would only like to have it. But he or she should be careful, even if the play seems clear, as  there is a lot to learn and to understand before letting the actors say their lines.

P.S  From Ronald Bryden's obituary

Bryden was a civilised man and exemplary critic: I remember Stanley Reynolds saying that, with his hawkish profile and plump stateliness, he even looked like a theatre critic. But, following the Tynan route, Bryden forsook criticism in 1972 to become play adviser to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/dec/06/guardianobituaries.michaelbillington

#aiww The Arrest of Ai WeiWei and Untold Stories

 APR.17.2013 

I spent last weekend in London and saw two plays. Although they were completely different, the first was #aiww The Arrest of Ai Weiwei at the Hampstead Theatre and the second Untold Stories: two autobiographical pieces by Alan Bennett at the Duchess Theatre, they were disappointing for the same reason.

#aiww The Arrest of Ai Weiwei tells the true story of his arrest by the Chinese government in Beijing airport as he was boarding a flight to Taipei. The charge was that  he “could damage state security”.  After the arrest  Weiwei disappeared for 81 days.

Howard Brenton wrote a play based on his conversations with Ai Weiwei after his release. The arrest and the disappearance are, no doubt, dramatic raw material and could have made an exciting and critical play had Brenton explored that area rather than dealt, in a most predictable way, with the question of what is art.

In the program notes by Edward Hall the artistic director of Hampstead Theatre he explains his choice of that topic: ”We had been looking for a play about China since starting in Hampstead and knew that it was a subject that Howard Brenton was keen to explore. The rise of China is clearly one of the most important developments of modern times but it has hardly been discussed.”

 The play that Brenton wrote has nothing novel to say about China, rather it uses the same old binary approach between the brave dissident artist whose work is banned, and the boorish Communists who throw him to jail because he makes money from an art that they cannot understand. I found the whole discussion condescending and tedious and stayed detached from what was on the stage almost until the end. However, after his release, in the final soliloquy when Ai Weiwei shatters an ancient Chinese vase then I felt anger and was almost ready to put him in prison again. There must have been another way to condemn the arbitrary and brutal actions of the Chinese. But what I saw was an arrogant and disrespectful act not toward the regime but rather toward the Chinese heritage as a whole.

 There is nothing wrong with questioning the merit of Weiwei's art and it was valid  to doubt the sincerity of  his  installations. It was disappointing for me to realize that in the 21st century a British play about China would still follow the old reductionist post-Colonial approach .

 The Second play Untold Stories consists of two pieces based on Alan Bennett’s memoir A Life Like Other People’s. In both pieces Alex Jennings plays Alan Bennett. In the first short one Hymn,  Jennings, accompanied by a string quartet, talks about music in his childhood. The second one Cocktail Sticks explores his relationship between his art and its buographical sources. I found the two pieces of  Untold Stories disappointing; here too the old discussion of art imitating life was tiresome. There were hints in the play to directions  that for me could have shown promise like his mother’s recurrent depression and her yearning for a more exciting life (a life in which people sip cocktails) but those topics were never developed..

I go to the theatre for the drama—the  action. Theatre is the medium for showing, especially as the first play is  about a visual artist and the second about a  playwright. In a peculiar way these  two very different plays chose the approach of telling and what they were telling has already been told a hundred time.

I think that next time I am in London I won’t take a chance and  go see the king of Showing, Shakespeare of course.