The Dramaturgy of Democracy: Michael Emans Touring Scotland

DEMOCRACY

by Michael Frayn

Democracy by Michael Frayn is a gripping spy thriller, based on a true story, from the writer of the West End Smash Noises Off.

West Germany, 1969. Charismatic Willy Brandt has been elected Chancellor. However, his own political party are starting to plot against him. 

As his enemies tighten the noose around his neck -and the threat of an East German spy in his own office is discovered - Brandt believes the only man he can truly trust is Gunter Guillaume, his devoted personal assistant. But in the world of political intrigue,espionage and betrayal, who can you trust?


What was the inspiration for this performance?

The play is one that I have always wanted to tackle as it has echoes of the great Shakespearean power plays that i love  . It is also extremely precedent in a world that is becoming increasingly politicised and where we have a political landscape that is increasingly changing and challenging .

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

The assembling of your collaborators whether that is in the casting or the selection of other members of your creative  team is crucial and one that I spend a lot of time on.

Casting  is about finding the best and most right people for the parts as well as taking into account that the plays tour and you also need people who can work well as a team .

The "team" also have to buy into your vision  and have to be prepared to follow you .

Does theatre still have a place in the public discussion of ideas - in what ways does this work feed that discussion?

Absolutely --the feedback we receive at post show discussions tell us that theatre is the ideal forum for discussion .

Our work is there to entertain but by entertain we mean to stimulate, challenge and provoke ---the feedback at the show and after the shows tell us we do that 

How did you become interested in making performance?

I have always wanted to direct plays and to create theatre from a very young age -- inspired by the great touring companies that I saw a youth 

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
The process in this project is still evolving  but I am finding it invigorating and challenging 


What do you hope that the audience will experience?

That they will fall in love with the play , in the same way I did .

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

How will they engage with the play and what "baggage" or previous experience that  they will bring to the play .


Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

Not really --- on the page Hamlet is Shakespeare's play  and but once you bring it to life its your Hamlet ---you shape your tradition yourself !!

Fresh from an acclaimed West End run in Gypsy movie actor Tom Hodgkins (Red 2 and Hanna) leads the cast as Willy Brandt with Brookside and RSC actor Neil Caple as Gunter. 

Completing the 10 strong cast is Colin McCredie (Taggart), Sean Scanlan (River City), Michael Moreland (Under
the Skin and 16 Years of Alcohol), Jack Lord (Crime and Punishment), Alan Steele (Bard in the Botanics), Jim Kitson (Globe Theatre), Steven Scott Fitzgerald (Shang-a–Lang) and Stewart Porter (River City, Shetland and The Sash).



Director 
Michael Emans
Set and Costume Design
Richard Evans

Cooking up a new dish with old ingredients

In his comprehensive study of pop and rock's apparent obsession with the past Retromania, Simon Reynolds sketches the present of music that is obsessed with its heritage. Aside from the inevitable problems faced by a music that is based on youth and innovation as it matures, Reynolds identifies the internet as enabling a massive archiving of previous trends and encouraging the mix and mash approach of much contemporary music. 

Theatre and performance, however, has always had a less ambiguous relationship with the past - the idea of classic rock might be a problem, and an immensely tedious cataloguing of worthy white male music, but classic theatre is far more easily assimilated into the performance process. The prevalence of Shakespeare, even Greek tragedy, or Chekov in the listings reveals that theatre's past remains part of its vitality.

With the Traverse looking back on fifty years of "new writing" by

selecting fifty contemporary playwrights and Sell A Door touring an adaptation of Orwell's 1984, artists still use the past as a foundation for experimentation. The longer time scales of theatre's history allow a company like Rapture to revive The Sash - originally written in 1973 - and point to its continued relevance, and when David Greig wanted to explore that most pressing modern anxiety, Scottish national identity, he went back to Macbeth. Theatre itself may be seen as old fashioned - certainly, both cinema and television are more immediate - but this allows it to consider the present in a wider context. 

For director Michael Emans, The Sash is as important today as it was at the time of its premiere. The story of a father and son, torn apart by the values that once brought them together - and dealing with the still intense sectarian divide in Glasgow - The Sash is sometimes mistaken for a relic of an early age. "The issues are still key today," says Emans. He regrets that  "it has been sucked into the void that is inhabited by plays like Still a Bigot that take a more politically incorrect view of these things." For while many of the plays that focus on Glasgow's religious conflicts go for the laughs and are conservative in their reading of the city's culture, The Sash is far more personal.

"It is set in 1973 at the height of the troubles in Ireland," Emans admits.  "1972 had been one of the most violent periods in Ireland: when Hector MacMillan wrote it it was immediate and raw, and that power comes across. But it is also about a family, and the Orange Order is still prolific and a lot of people are part of it."

 "It has a lot of emotional and political clout: how the family unit can be destroyed by destroyed by belief," Emans explains. Insisting that it is "a neglected contemporary classic," he points out that "it could be about any father and son who are driven apart because of entrenched beliefs - whether they are religious beliefs or not."

Emans' case for The Sash implicitly invokes the power of theatre to tell both a specific story - this one revolves around a father's traditional faith in the Orange Order against his son's more progressive - and erotic - desires - and examine its underlying metaphysics. Emans is resisting the temptation to update the script.

"It is still very glasgow," he admits. "The action is still set in the early 1970s, before punk rock and rave exposed intergenerational conflict more clearly but he is delighted that the nature of the dramatic conflict is universal. "You can connect to the politics or the intellectual idea of the play. It's a real ride of a play and we are very excited about it."

"It questions how you reconcile a tradition with the aspirations of your children," he continues. "That obsession where people hold onto things because it gives them a sense of belief and consequently alienates other people. If you are stuck you can loose the thing that you want to nurture, that you are prepared to forego a relationship with your family. " While Reynolds ponders the problems of pop's increasing obsession with the past, bemoaning, amongst other things, how the museums of rock'n'roll give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than to what is happening now, Emans has recognised that the past isn't as distant or different as it might appear.

Meanwhile, Gob Squad are bringing a different reading of past glory to the stage: Kitchen restages Andy Warhol's film as a live performance. But this version is a very long way away from the kind of reverential musical that transforms Priscilla Queen of the Desert into a star vehicle for Jason Donovan. In the spirit of Warhol's movie, there's plenty of improvisation, waiting and questioning. 

Homing in on an earlier decade than The Sash, and a more radical location in New York, Kitchen does poke at some of the same questions, mostly around the theme of change. Undoubtedly, a revolution was happening in Warhol's Factory, but its nature is not yet clear. Gob Squad have a crack at discussing those issues that are still in ferment today (feminism is a major concern for the actors in 1965 and 2013). 

Unlike The Sash, however, it has the anxiety of being hip and trying to work out what it means to be ahead of the pack. 

Kitchen takes Warhol more as a foundation than a fundamental text, and plays hard and fast with the original film, even adding in elements from his other movies and boasting "modern haircuts." There's a clear acknowledgement that this is a reinterpretation. If the 1960s produced much of the most exciting music in pop, there are broader cultural changes of the same period which are still being felt today. The rise in hipster fashions reflect Warhol's influence on art culture, and the performed amorality of Warhol himself (he remained a devout Catholic benrath his apparently superficial persona) echoes in the dry superficiality of much contemporary art - which itself might be a game or front.

The contrast between the two pieces elegantly emphasises the complexity of theatre's history. Gob Squad are themselves an avant-garde company, in the sense of using a more informal process of creation than the script, yet they find themselves casting glances back to an earlier period for clues. Warhol's films are perhaps most dated by those things, like not learning lines, that made it so now in 1965. The Sash maintains its philosophical energy through the old school techniques of script and direction.

Both The Sash and Kitchen might come under the theatre banner, and has some overlap in themes, but they are as different in genre as The Velvet Underground and Wylie: if theatre is more comfortable with its own past than popular music, it has a similar diversity of style, which is sometimes obscured by the conformity of critical approaches. In the example of the Traverse's Fifty emerging playwrights, or the various performances that visit Summerhall (from zomble infestation immersive, scientific theatre to French clown tales of Russian writers), it's possible to imagine a variety of voices that specialise as much as the independent music charts. 

But for Emans there is something that connects all great theatre. "I am interested in plays that can transform people - that an audience come out of it thinking different things -  it's almost therapeutic," he says.  "The name of my company,  Rapture means a heightened state of awareness. Spectacle  is wonderful but if the substance can move people that is more wonderful." And above all, Kitchen and The Sash are connected by their willingness to provoke both questions and this intense experience.



The Sash On tour across Scotland until June 
Gob Squad's Kitchen The Arches 3 May, 7,30pm 

CATS 2014: Shortlist for Male actor and Thoughts

BEST MALE PERFORMANCE:

Adam Best (Raskolnikov), Crime and Punishment, Citizens Theatre, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Looking pretty hardcore in this photo (credit: Tim-Morozzo), Best got to play a dream part: the existential hero of Dostoevsky's novel that saved me from wondering whether it was okay to break the law if I was cool enough (it isn't). A big role, that addressed the audience on matters philosophical and went increasingly wild as the guilt heated up, Best's performance was an intriguing mix of bad-ass and sensitive poet. Just like Raskolnikov himself...






Jimmy Chisholm (Bob Lawson), The Collection, Rapture Theatre in association with the Beacon Greenock

While Tam Dean Burn played the guy you really wouldn't want turning up to the door, Chisholm pulled on his natural stage presence to present Bob Lawson, Scotland's answer to that one in Death of A Salesman. In a play that is earnest and horrific (shades of the fast-talking bastards who hide behind lovely adverts for extortionate loans), Lawson's tragedy is the problem of giving a shit in an industry of shits. 

Sandy Grierson (Ivor Cutler), The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Vanishing Point and the National Theatre of Scotland presented in association with Eden Court
Being Ivor Cutler was always going to be a tough gig: add in (Grierson's own co-written) version of the man, who dances in his imagination, and a storytelling structure that has Grierson jump between himself and Cutler, then Grierson had a showcase for versatility. Sometimes he was Ivor the confused older man, sometimes the laconic singer, other times the cheeky outsider. 

Scott Reid (Thomas), A Perfect Stroke, A Play, a Pie and a Pint presented by the Traverse Theatre Company
A month after seeing this, I can't decide whether Reid's Thomas was a victim or predator. It's a tough ask to play a schoolboy having at go at seducing the teacher, and Reid's big red face when he got angry suggests he'll be playing Lear at some point in the future. With McKnight's script awkward and subtle, Reid's role was pivotal for the sense of sexual unease. He is doing some acting exercises in the photo (credit:  Lesley Black), I think. Perfectly innocent

The Slash My Father Swore

The decision to play The Sash as a period drama, despite it recounting a relatively recent period of history, isn’t necessarily a confession that the script has lost its relevance. In the period after the Good Friday Agreement, the vivid descriptions of terrorist attacks and the sporadic racist references are more likely to connect to the current War on Terror and Islamophobia than the battle for a united Ireland, yet the core prejudices on display – sectarianism from protestant and Roman Catholic - are still, sadly, part of Glaswegian life.

Most strikingly, the obnoxious behaviour comes from both sides of the divide. The aging Orangeman is given the most melodramatic, and comic, bigotry, but his Catholic neighbour gets in a fair few digs. Even today, there is something outrageous about hearing this kind of language on stage and the message – that the conflict in Ireland was originally not about religion but freedom – is supported by both sides insistence on a loyalty to a parents’ values.

Perhaps the differences between 1973, when the play was written and set, and 2013 are in the aspirations of the younger characters. There is a rejection of older values, with a protestant son wanting to discuss the historical truth behind the myth of Good King Billy and the pregnant Catholic daughter rejecting the certainties of her faith’s moral teachings for a socialist alternative. And the rare reference to the Soviet ideal of Russia is jarring. The aftermath of the USSR might not have revealed the propaganda of the USA as accurate, but it undermined that nation as a shining example of universal brotherhood.

Yet the conflict between the generations, and the final failure to find an honorable solution, lends The Sash its relevance. Its vision of the Orange Order as a fading presence might have been premature, but the arguments between son and father have an almost archetypal ferocity. Snippets of information about William of Orange’s allegiances and conduct contextualise his hagiography by the Order into a brutal history, and the details of bombing in Ireland locate the action in a period when paramilitary activity was intense: yet the intergenerational throw downs could come from any year in the past fifty.

Because the conflicts described in The Sash `are still present in Glasgow, it doesn’t quite slip into a complete period drama: the issues are more immediate than those in the political plays from south of the border written in the same period. It carefully charts the way that political upheaval impacts on personal life. A relationship collapses, a father tumbles out of a window, a Catholic aunt berates her niece for being pregnant outside of wedlock and the vitality of Irish Republicanism and Orange Pride are gradually ossified.

The question of whether The Sash would make much sense outside of Scotland is pertinent: when intellectuals talk about Scottish identity, they conveniently ignore the sectarian divide even though it is one of the most distinctive qualities that distinguish English and Scottish cultures. There are enclaves in England, such as Manchester, that have a similar relationship to the past. However, the mutual loathing of Billy and Tim is rarely so noticeable in the south.

Rapture are being difficult by restaging this classic. It would be far easier to put The Sash in the same category as The Bigot and The Pavilion pantomime, relics of a by-gone age. Unfortunately, the numbers in the audience attest to its popularity, and the nihilistic vision of culture – nobody wins the argument, and only the final song, which insists that once men were “neither orange men nor green” is a tattered flag of hope – is a bracing counterblast to the optimistic predictions of the contemporary politician. Respecting the way that the play itself is awkward, being neither clearly political nor personal, historical nor contemporary, this production, Michael Emans lets the story tell itself, not even flinching at the unappetising attitudes it displays towards religion, women and the idealism of the young.