Noises off: Is theatre elitist?

arts.guardian.co.uk - Theatre blogs are anxiously debating whether 'experimental' theatre turns off 'regular' peopleIf you're a playwright, who should you be writing for - yourself or other people? This debate began when Scott Walters noticed this post on the Poor Player blog, in which Tom Loughlin laments the fact that he has hit a period of artistic ennu: the theatre and art he sees around him have lost their appeal. The only thing that still holds his interest are "the people I meet who have absolutely nothing to do with theatre or academia," he writes. "The man doing my bathroom is a great guy and wonderful to talk to… I ate lunch yesterday with a complete stranger at a local diner and had an interesting conversation about next to nothing." He concludes: "I wish I knew how to create theatre for these people. I'm depressed that I don't. They deserve better."For Walters, this sentiment goes to the core of what he thinks theatre should aim to do. We should, he says, be "trying to create theatre that has something to say to people who are just living life day to day. Not high-flying intellectuals, not artists, but just the folks who work the cash registers of our lives." He expands on this idea in another post where he analyses Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, set during the Great Depression. This play, he says, engages in a kind of formal experimentation that can be hugely alienating to many people. He describes how one elderly couple who saw it "were left desperately trying to figure out what the hell happened. Instead of trusting the power of her story and the humanity of her characters, Wallace had turned her play into an elaborate puzzle." He goes on: "Wallace's play took the working class experience seriously, the small town experience seriously, but she couldn't write for them - she had to signal that, while she was on their side, she is still a member of the intelligentsia, the artist-specialist class."This question of social class in theatre is a fraught one. After all, the average theatre audience in both the UK and US is overwhelmingly middle-class, thus raising all sorts of ethical and aesthetic questions about how one presents the lives of people on a different rung of the social ladder. As J Holtham asks in a guest post on the Parabasis blog: "Is there a difference between writing TO an audience, writing FOR an audience and writing ABOUT an audience?" It can be very tempting to agree with John McGrath, who suggests in his remarkable book A Good Night Out that if we are to dramatise the lives of working people on stage, then we should seek out theatrical forms with which those working people will most easily be able to connect.Yet do we ever have the right to tell writers how they should or should not be writing? Matthew Freeman argues that we do not. His response to the arguments of Walters is simple: "Write your own plays." "There's no use scolding artists when their experiments don't connect with you," he writes. "They're going to experiment anyway. Those same experiments do connect with someone, I'll bet. Maybe not you all the time. Luckily, there are lots and lots of plays. Go read a different one." Walters, in a follow up post, acknowledges that the best solution is not to persuade existing writers to change, but to encourage those who have never written before to put pen to paper for the first time.Of course, the experimental and the popular don't always have to be opposed. I leave you with this fascinating interview with Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment and occasional diarist on this site, on the Art Review website, which marks Etchells's current exhibition at the Gasworks Gallery in London. Etchells's discussion of his project, Art Flavours, where he sought to forge a collaboration between the Italian academic and critic Roberto Pinto and the ice-cream maker Osvaldo Castellari is an excellent example of how high-brow experimentalism can be brought together with a quite literally tasty populism. Buon appetito.TheatreChris Wilkinsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds More... (Theatre)

Party | Comedy review

arts.guardian.co.uk - Arts theatre, LondonThere are pitfalls when comedians make theatre. Sometimes they strive too hard to be serious; sometimes (judging by the reviews of last summer's The School for Scandal), they don't strive hard enough. The 2007 If.Comedy award winner for best newcomer, Tom Basden, sweeps all such considerations aside with his new play about student politics, an idiosyncratic and highly enjoyable piece performed beautifully by a crack cast of upcoming comics.It's light on plot, but funny enough for that not to matter. Four dopey students have assembled in wannabe leader Jared's shed - summerhouse, he claims - to draft a manifesto for their right-on new political party. The fifth attendee, Duncan (Edinburgh Comedy award champ Tim Key) has been invited because his dad runs a printer's shop, which is handy for marketing. But Duncan cares less for campaigning than for the lemon drizzle cake.This generation of comics is much given to childlike behaviour in their own work: Josie Long is all sticky-tape and crayons; Anna Crilly and Katy Wix (who both star here) make like delinquent infants in their sketch shows. Basden so exaggerates his characters' petulance and political ignorance that they're no longer remotely plausible as adults. These are people who go tongue-tied when asked to talk about climatechange; who think "Muslims" counts as a country. These are, in other words, overgrown kids - vividly so, in the case of current Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer Jonny Sweet, whose curiously fey manner (his delivery is half singsong, half orgasmic moan) brings the bossy-boots would-be PM Jared irresistibly to life.But who cares about credibility when the style is this seductive, and the jokes this good? The script bears the hallmarks of Basden's standup: witness nuggets such as "What is pillaging?" "It's somewhere between rape and theft." There are echoes of Brass Eye, too, in the ridiculously binary foreign policies: "Are we for or against China?" Elsewhere, the script simply gets out of the way, leaving the stage clear for extraneous comic business, such as the oddball sequence in which Duncan fills right to the brim everyone else's glass of water.Party is like Camus's Les Justes restaged by precocious Sunday school pupils. The satire is slight, but stealthy - not least in the suggestion that democracy as reinvented by simplistic idiots still passingly resembles the system now in use, or the play's hint that, if you started politics from scratch these days, the first thing you'd consider would be branding. These points are lightly made, in a production by Phillip Breen that is chock-full of gags and charisma. You wouldn't want this lot running the country. But comedy-wise, they get my vote.Rating: 4/5ComedyTheatreBrian Loganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds More... (Theatre)

Waiting: detainees' wives get a voice their husbands never had | Victoria Brittain

arts.guardian.co.uk - All the women in my new verbatim play, Waiting, found Britain an oasis of safety. Then 9/11 changed all thatFor years I have witnessed the "war on terror" with an intimacy few outsiders have, through women living in Britain whose husbands were in Guantánamo Bay. Mutual friends put us in touch, and we became friends - across a gulf of language, culture, religion and experience.Close up, I saw a truly frightening level of isolation, fear and despair. But I also heard touching love stories, saw the happiness of children placed above everything else, and an extraordinary resilience drawn from faith. Through these women, I met others, whose husbands were detained in Belmarsh prison under suspicion of terrorism - but with no charges brought. After their husbands' arrests, these women were abruptly isolated, even within their own communities. Their children's futures became unpredictable; the children themselves were scarred by confusion, fear, and - the older ones, sometimes - hatred. Under the pressure of incarceration (or, later, under house arrest), their husbands changed personality; they were gripped by paranoia; several went on hunger strike or tried to commit suicide; many remain on heavy medication.Two summers ago, after the first reading of my play about these women's lives, one of the actors sent me a text message. She said that whenever she saw a veiled woman on the bus she thought of Sabah, the woman whose part she had read and whose life she now couldn't get out of her mind. This weekend, Juliet Stevenson will play Sabah, one of eight Muslim women whose lives have been translated into verbatim musical theatre.It was Vanessa Redgrave's idea to make it musical. She read the script and said: "It should be an opera." But the idea terrified me: I wanted to keep the precision and detail of the text. I disregarded the idea until I met the composer Jessica Dannheisser, and heard her use a mixture of sung and spoken text in a performance of poetry and music for Palestine at Cadogan Hall. Maybe it would work, if she would take my play on. She did. Then her friend, the director Poppy Burton-Morgan, persuaded me to drop some characters, and miraculously produced the libretto for two singers.Some of my favourite actors - Gemma Jones, Manjinder Virk, Harriet Ladbury and Diana Hardcastle - came on board. Then came the cellist, Oliver Coates, the soprano Anna Dennis, and the mezzo-soprano Carole Wilson. A total of eight performers - three of them seen in short film sequences - play women from cultures as varied as those of Senegal, France, Jordan, Palestine, India and the English Midlands. In previous lives, some had been basketball stars, or teachers; some have degrees in business administration or economics. Others came from households where they were not involved in many family decisions.Like all verbatim plays, the truth of this one - which I called Waiting - depends on using only the actual words of actual people. These words have mainly been collected from many lengthy conversations, some of them translated from Arabic by the children, some of them taped interviews.All of these women came to Britain as refugees, or married refugees here. All had found Britain an oasis of safety; for many of them, their lives were in sharp contrast to the years of prison or torture previously suffered by their husbands. But 9/11 ended their idyll. Foreign men were arrested in droves for American cash bounties in Pakistan and Afghanistan - or on a business trip in Gambia, in the case of Sabah's husband - and sent to Guantánamo. In Britain, on 19 December 2001, a dozen foreign Muslim men were interned without trial in Belmarsh prison. Their wives had no means of knowing what had happened to their husbands and why.I never planned to write about my friends: privacy was extremely important to them. Only once or twice, when they specifically asked me to, did I write articles about them. But when I began to think about Waiting, it was as a joint project, a telling of life stories. When they come to London's South Bank to see the play this weekend, it will be as much to hear each other's stories as to see their own presented.Each of these women have so much in common; each has been changed forever by their experience of Britain. Their own words put it most powerfully. One said: "I can't remember happiness." Another woman recalled going to the zoo with her daughter's class. "She was so happy, so excited, running to see animals she'd never seen, like the giraffes," she told me. "I was smiling for her, but inside I was only thinking of those cages, and my husband in his cage." For some, things have gone from bad to worse, and then worse again. "Nobody can see my heart. This time will stay in my heart forever ... I must forget. I must forgive." After each show there will be a discussion including Salma Yaqoob, Helena Kennedy QC, Gareth Peirce, Manjinder Virk, Riz Ahmed, and Moazzam Begg.TheatreGuantánamo BayRefugeesVictoria Brittainguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds More... (Theatre)