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Are You Watching?

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Kosar Ali and Abby McCann. Photo by Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer – Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

The most disturbing aspect of Georgie Dettmer’s play about internet horror, at the top of a long list, are the two teenage girls. Kosar Ali and Abby McCann watch in their pyjamas from their bunk beds, as the full capacity of online culture to sexualise society and victimise women plays out for their entertainment. It does so with the audience lined up facing one another, either side of Georgia Wilmot’s white-tiled swimming pool style stage, with its unsettling, clinical, wipe-clean implications.

Dettmer’s debut play is a cry of rage, which lives on in the minds of viewers after the curtain, not least because it is about the consequences of watching. Scenes play out as a series of unconnected but thematically linked vignettes, viewed by the two girls. Nothing protects them from seeing whatever they choose on their screens and, as they discuss the worst things they’ve ever watched, the darkness of the material they are exposed to becomes all too clear. The play is clearly inspired by real-life events. There is a Giselle Pelicot story about a women drugged by her husband, raped by his friends and filmed. A Hollywood actress has nude images grimly manipulated on the internet, as her fury with the tech bosses whose platforms host the material builds. A father makes child abuse AI videos of his son. A woman takes part in research monitoring her reactions to increasingly extreme material. A young man wins a competition to sleep with an actress. The police manipulate a mother whose daughter is missing, to get the same level of attention they did for Madeleine McCann.

The deluge of dark scenarios assaults our senses and challenges our understanding of the world we live in, powered by Jess Edwards’ sharp direction, a shutter sound clanging each scene to a close. Performances are excellent, including Nicholas Rowe as an authority figure legitimising exploitation, Lucy McCormick, barely able to hide her desperation, and Maimuna Memon and Billy Bolt as, among other characters, a couple filming one another having sex.

Dettmer’s anger is clear, and it gives the play a fierce energy. The vignette structure that provides this energy also muddies the wider message to some extent. The overall theme is to be that by acting as voyeurs we are enabling and creating abuse of women in lots of different ways, and that we dehumanise ourselves and others by imagining our lives as sexual content. However, the audience is left in some doubt about how every element of the play contributes to the play’s thesis. Nevertheless, it is an urgent piece of writing, a significant achievement for a first time writer, and the kind of work that made the Royal Court famous. If Caryl Churchill and Edward Bond got together, they might produce something rather like this.

The Plough and the Stars

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Photo by Roz Kavanagh

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey – Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Published at Plays International

Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play is a super-local drama, describing events that took place on the Abbey Theatre’s doorstep during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Set in a nearby tenement block around the corner from the General Post Office, as it is besieged by the British Army, it is a masterpiece with Shakespearian character and scale but, as a modern work, a more immediate impact. Tom Creed’s centenary production for the Abbey revisits a play which, at its première, upset sections of the audience so much they rioted. Theatrical riots can seem strange and archaic: it is hard to understand why the Abbey’s patrons got so hot under the collar at the Abbey première of A Playboy of the Western World twenty years earlier. However, it is entirely different with The Plough and the Stars. Creed’s riveting production reveals it to be provocative and iconoclastic one hundred years on, and relevant to an extent that should alarm us as a society.

In Dublin, where streets and stations are named after Easter Uprising leaders and 1916 is commemorated all over town, questioning the credentials of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers is close to heresy. Sean O’Casey tears the rebels to pieces, along with the British. He pulls idealisers to the ground, and elevates ordinary, fundamentally flawed people who do not live the lives politicians imagine for them. Snatches of Patrick Pearse’s speeches ahead of the uprising drift through the pub window during the play, his calls for a blood sacrifice to cleanse the soil sounding fascistic and unhinged. As we fail to learn the endlessly repeated lesson that violence brutalises and destroys, the play still has the capacity to upset the accepted view of history. 

O’Casey’s towering achievement is to craft a play built around such a large, complex, yet wholly convincing cast of characters. His tenement inhabitants reveal a society with an ease comparable to the Henry IV plays. There are many fine roles, but it is particularly notable how well he wrote the female characters, who are all complex, unidealised and alive – an achievement beyond most male playwrights of the time. The Abbey’s cast are fully immersed in the play’s world, and seem to emerge from the setting rather than imposing their performances on it. Kate Glimore’s tragic Nora Clitheroe puts everything she has into saving Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty’s doomed Jack, knows exactly what she has to lose, and fails. Her descent into madness is horrifying. Mary Murray’s Bessie Burgess is confrontational and aggressive, but also unexpectedly kind, with a tale as confounding as anyone. Kate Stanley Brennan is very funny as Mrs. Grogan, her lyricism and larking a terrible counterpoint to her hollow-eyed, dying daughter Mollser (Evie May O’Brien). O’Casey’s incorporation of humour into the dark events is a masterclass in dramatic writing. Caitríona Ennis’s Rosie is desperate, but achieves a moment of remarkable dignity when she, accused of being a prostitute, her silence speaks volumes. 

The men in the play do not understand what is coming, and what the consequences of war will be. Michael Glenn Murphy’s Peter Flynn is a comic braggart, perhaps the most ludicrous character in the play, from a Shakespearian lineage of old men who fancy themselves as soldiers. Thommas Kane Byrne’s Marxist Young Covey is smackably smug and very entertaining, but also the only man who lets his front fall apart at the end. Fluther is one of the great comic everyman roles, a man who survives despite his own best efforts, and Dan Monaghan delivers both entertainment and depth. Ash Rizi, Fintan Kinsella and Conor Wolfe O’Hara as the British soldiers who arrive on the scene to make things, inevitably, much worse are frightened and dangerous. 

Jamie Vartan’s sets are somewhat confrontational, consisting of unpainted, plywood flats and minimal decor, but they prove very effective. At times the characters feel like ghosts, inhabiting a place that is fading out around them, casting long shadows on the bare walls. The revolve is elegantly used to switch scenes, and seems to echo the transience of time and the lives it contains. The production is superbly powerful – in the commitment of the performers, the vivacity of the characters who live on, a century down the line, and the uncompromising message of the play – that war is madness. Creed’s production reaffirms O’Casey’s status as a great writer who still has much to teach, and whose work remains gripping from start to finish.

Lost Atoms

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Anna Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Lost Atoms by Anna Jordan – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International

Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan, is the 30th anniversary production for Frantic Assembly, who are a staple of the UK’s 21st century touring scene. Led throughout by Scott Graham, the company is known for making movement the core of their expression, and devising their own method entwining the text and the physical. The Frantic Method has been very influential, shaping a performance style that is very distinctively of our time. Frantic have achieved a great deal, applying their approach to classic text and new writing with equal success. It is all the more impressive that their world is smaller touring venues rather than the big commercial or subsidised theatres, where experimental work that challenges audiences is needed most. It is entirely appropriate that Lost Atoms is a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, the Curve in Leicester and the Mayflower, Southampton.

For their anniversary tour they have chosen a new play by Jordan who, since her last play in 2018, has been working on television series such as One Day for Netflix. Lost Atoms is about ordinary living, and what that really entails. A couple meet, get together and go through experiences related to pregnancy which are both common, and unforgettably traumatic. There is a cast of just two: Joe Layton plays Robbie, and Anna Sinclair Robinson plays Jess. Their meeting involves coffee shop wifi, and they get together through a series of chances, gradually working out how much they like each other. They encounter each other’s families, and all they bring – cleverly staged through one-sided conversations. Then Jess gets pregnant. It is impossible to discuss the plot without giving too much away, but what follows tests their relationship to the limits.

There are remarkable similarities with Luke Norris’ play Guess How Much I Love You?, currently playing at the Royal Court, which also has a cast of two, and concerns a relationship beset by pregnancy trauma. However, under Scott Graham’s direction the style of Lost Atoms is very different. Layton and Sinclair Robinson use Andrezj Goulding’s set – a bank of filing cabinets – like a climbing wall. Drawers pull out to become seats, steps, even a toilet, but they also act as drawers, containing props but also memories. A massive slab, looking disturbingly like the door to an ancient tomb, flips up to form a bed, angling the couple towards the audience in mid-air. The physicality of the performers is, at times, mesmerising. They are frequently performing while horizontal, or suspended at gravity-defying angles. They move in relation to one another throughout, expressing the closeness and distance of an intimate relationship through their bodies as much as their words.

The story is told in flashback, as Jess and Robbie explain what happened to them for the benefit, it seems, of the audience. It takes time to get going and the first half, which shows us their developing relationship, tells us less than the second. The performers become more convincing as the stress mounts, and they move away from the sometimes exaggerated naivety of their initial personas. Lost Atoms truly draws the audience in when it starts to explore what happens to people behind closed doors, in cold NHS consulting rooms and tiny flats. We think we know what life is about, but human drama is at its most extreme in everyday settings, just out of sight. Frantic Assembly’s production showcases the strengths of their work, with complete physical commitment to storytelling. Actors do things you may never have seen on a stage before, but which seem strangely natural. Conventional theatre can seem static in comparison.

Scenes from a Repatriation

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Photo: Alex Brenner

Published at Plays International

Scenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan – Royal Court Upstairs, London

Joel Tan’s new play is an ambitious overview of a post-colonial world, examined through the fraught question of museum repatriations. A statue of the Boddhisattva Guanyin, on display in the British Museum overlooing the gift shop, becomes the focus of attention in the UK and in China, from where it was stolen during the destruction and looting of the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, by British and French troops. The violence of this act echoes in the opening moments of the play. The production, directed by emma + pj, has powerful sound design by Patch Middleton, who conjures the screams and earth-shaking roars as soldiers burn the palace in a fire which killed more than 300 servants.

Scenes from a Repatriation switches characters and sometimes eras with each scene. They are announced on a screen formatted like object labels in a museum. The play is in two parts. The first half, set in the present day, tells the story of pressure on British Museum curators to return Guanyin to China, while exploring the experience of people of Chinese origin living in the UK. The second half takes place in China after the return, and features more loosely connected scenes, probing politics, money, social relations in China itself. Tan pushes the limits of the format, staging an epic with a cast of only six, in the Royal Court’s small Upstairs space. It is not entirely successful, but when it works it works well.

The cast, constantly switching roles, do a very good job of telling a narrative that always remains entirely clear. The cast are predominantly performers of Chinese origin, and some scenes are performed in subtitled Cantonese and Mandarin, rare on the London stage. Kaja Chan switches with great fluidity between roles from English curator to Mandarin-speaking secret police interrogator. Sky Yang shows similar range, moving among roles that include a protesting Chinese student and the Scottish soldier who first looted the statue.

The play gives us much to admire, and is also frustrating at times. It would have benefited from an edit. There are a couple of scenes that do not work well, in particular an encounter at a party between a wealthy Chinese businessman, an ingratiating employee and his hired female companion, in which the characters appear either stupid or viciously misogynistic. The production’s tone is also confusing at times, shifting between broad parody – a comic posh curator, a doddery professor, a protest group called Islington Witches for Change – and the intense realism of an interrogation in a Hong Kong prison cell, which diffuse the play’s focus and impact.

However, many scenes do really hit home. A student, boycotting the British Museum, explains to his tutor how Guan Yin is a surrogate mother figure for young Chinese people far from him. A flashback takes us into the mind of a soldier looking down on himself as he loots the Summer Palace. The tokenism of a Chinese-themed British Museum Late is neatly skewered. And the interrogation scene, in which a cartoonist is questioned about the political intentions of his work, is powerful – the interrogator perched high up behind a screen and a civilised veneer that fails to hide that the outcome is never in doubt.

Scenes From a Repatriation brings wider issues to the stage that are both current and neglected. The conduct of the British and colonial armies in China in successive opium wars during the second half of the 19th century, intentionally forgotten in the West, is well-remembered in China and influences international politics now as much as it ever did. The return of looted objects is an issue becoming impossible to ignore. But the play is also about human dislocation: Chinese people looked down upon in the UK, Chinese students propping up the higher education system, oppression of Uiyghurs, crackdowns in Hong Kong. Empires then and empires now use people as their currency.

The production is urgent and exciting – video from Tyler Forward and lighting by Alex Fernandes are integral to the fast-paced story-telling. Joel Tan’s play is entertaining and urgent, with so many stories to tell that they cannot be contained. Perhaps if more work by writers and performers from Chinese backgrounds was staged, there would be less need to cover everything in one go. However, Tan has created real political theatre, dramatising debates that are difficult, unresolved and unavoidable, and reflecting our society in an unexpected light. The Royal Court is fulfilling its mission by staging plays like these.

Ghosts

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Victoria Smurfit and Rhashan Stone. Credit: Helen Murray

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen adapted by Gary Owen – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International.

The back of The Captain’s heavy, balding head is literally papered onto the walls of Merle Hensel’s set for the Lyric’s new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in a repeating patten. He may be dead, but his menacing presence looms large in the lives of everyone he has left behind. Meanwhile, the rear wall is a curtain of mist, dimly reflecting the characters who wander, lost, through a mental fog. The marble and leather opulence of the expensive interior does nothing to disguise the unresolved anguish which is pulling everyone apart from the inside. The Captain was a larger-than-life figure, a bully, a philanderer and arapist. Gary Owen’s pin-sharp updating of Ibsen’s classic preserves the generational impact of dark, unacknowledged secrets, while making them completely of the moment.

The Lyric’s boss, Rachel O’Riordan, has a fruitful artistic relationship with Owen including their hit Iphigenia in Splott. Their new collaboration feels like an event. The show’s emotional impact smoulders from the very first scene, as Rashan Stone’s lawyer, Andersen, visits the Captain’s widow, Helena (Victoria Smurfitt), to discuss arrangements for a new children’s home to be funded by his legacy. The professional atmosphere rapidly dissolves in the face of their unresolved relationship as old lovers. Callum Scott Howells, a force of nature as Helena’s deeply troubled son Oz, arrives on the scene to confront the older generation with the consequences of their silence. His burgeoning relationship with the Captain’s unacknowledged daughter Reggie (Patricia Allison) is both sweet and real, and deeply troubling as they discover they are half-siblings. Meanwhile, her non-biological father, Jacob (Deka Walmsley), is from a different social world, from where he can see exactly how poisonous a situation she is in.

Owen’s rewrite is masterful, pulling the play from its 19th century setting and refocusing on the human relationships that make it powerful and current. The lurking threat of syphilis, which no longer makes sense, is removed making space to dive into the realities of a coercive relationship, the corrosive power relationships created by wealth, and the terrible dilemma of discovering you are closely related to your lover. Ghosts is brilliantly cast. Victoria Smurfit, making a rare and welcome stage appearance, is perfect as a woman struggling with her inability to speak out against her abuser. She switches between full insight and reversion to the language of the oppressor. Her relationship with her son, Oz, is at the centre of the play. Callum Scott Howells is Gen Z to the core in bleached hair and Adidas tracksuit bottoms, his emotions always on the surface. He hides nothing, but being open to his feelings of rejection does not make them easier to bear. The generational gap with his mother, who hid everything to protect him, comes to a head in a scene reminiscent of Gertrude and Hamlet, where he questions her about whether she was raped. It draws gasps from the audience, as do several scenes during the evening.

Rashan Stone’s Anderson is a much more sympathetic character than his original, the hypocritical Pastor Manders. He gives a deeply human performance as a man trying hard to do the right thing, and finding there are no good choices. Patricia Allison’s Reggie is spiky, and fully aware of how much she has to lose while Deka Walmsley, as her father, is also more sympathetic than Ibsens’ original, using what little power he has to protect his daughter. Jacob, a painter-decorator with a broad East Anglian accent, emphasises the social gulf between the wealthy, living in coastal luxury, and those who work for them, who have very few options.

Ghosts is a significant achievement, a fresh look at a classic which shows us just how powerful Ibsen’s writing can be. Gary Owen turns our attention to themes easily obscured by the differences between eras. His version includes a powerful, entirely real evocation of Anderson’s lifelong, unrequited love for Helena. It draws on the power of public image, with the children’s home destroyed by the threat of toxic press coverage, rather than burning down, as in the original. He explores, in excruciating detail, how parents come to emotionally damage their children. And he gives a sophisticated, convicing analysis of the insidious ways a coercive relationship isolates and destroys a woman. Ghosts is a gripping, beautifully acted show, driven by a creative vision that brings this 150-year-old play pulsatingly to life.