Physical Theatre

I tend to excuse my limited knowledging by presenting it as part of a critical process: unlike the more circumspect academic, who will access books and videos, I prefer to build my understanding of a particular art form through my experience of it. There are problems inherent in this process - I blush at the idiocy of my earlier attemts to define physical theatre, based on two shows I saw at the National Review of Live Art and a vague programme note by Steve Slater - but the bold statement, made to be revised and desperately carving a tiny space in the critical corpus, is at least entertaining and when wrong, controversial enough to encourage somebody to correct me.

In other words, I retain the right to be complacent, ignorant, melodramatic, wrong, partisan and partial. I place more emphasis on the comment that can stimulate debate than the definitive definition. And I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

So, having said all of that, let's get down to today's grand statements. Without a safety net, I am going to discuss physical theatre. Welcome.

Physical theatre is, in the largest definition, any theatre that is not a radio play. The other extreme is that it is a particular approach to theatre, inspired in the UK by the work of DV8 and Frantic Assembly, that combines choreography and script. A couple of Fringes back, I tried to call it "any theatre that begins not with the word, but the body and movement" and then spent an entire August breaking down work into categories, annoying performers and Aristotleans around the world.

Then I went for this. "If contemporary dance is what happened in the west when dancers flung off the constraints of ballet, physical theatre is the next step: performers throwing off the constraints of contemporary dance."

If that isn't too annoying, I am going to explore what I think physical theatre might be by comparing four productions: Knee Deep, Formby, The Static and SexLife. They were all in the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe.

Knee Deep and The Static are physical theatre. Formby and SexLife are not. My categorisations here are instinctive. Now I am going to work out why I think this.

Knee Deep is a series of acrobatic routines - very impressive and performed with intense concentration and a cool soundtrack - that conjures not a narrative but shifting moods. The company, Cacus, come from a circus background and Knee Deep attempts to strip away both the carnival trappings and the compulsion to link together the tricks through any narrative. They remove the glamour found in, say, La Clique's burlesque influenced acrobatics, and the sort of story told by Tumble Circus in This Is What We Do For A Living, which chronicles a relationship break-up.

The Static is a mixture of Davey Anderson's script and the direction of two Frantic Assembly alumni: deeply indebted to the Frantic Assembly house style, where scripted passages alternate with choreographed sequences, it has a story - boy meets girl, boy blows up school - and characterisation. That the characterisation is a little archetypal rather than nuanced is more to do with the script than the movement.

What these share is an interest in communication of ideas through movement alone. Admittedly, The Static has a bad habit of describing a scene before it is choreographed (the boy announces that if this were a film, the next bit would be a montage, before leaping into a movement montage to music). But the intention is clear. The choreography is central to the impact of both pieces.

Formby is a one man show, starring a former member of Matthew Bourne's cast for Swan Lake. And a central centre features some nifty tap dancing. But the thrust of the story - it's a recap of George Formby's life, as charming as the man himself - is relayed through the songs and the storytelling.
Davey Anderson uses a great deal of storytelling in The Static - the actors often drop character to comment on the plot - but Formby would rapidly collapse without the monologue. Dropping the dance sequence here would lose nothing but a rather impressive spot of syncopation. That would be a shame, but not devastating to the overall show. If the scene where the four actors in The Static dance the hero's training in mental superpowers, the stop would stop making sense.

In SexLife, the naked body marks a major shift in the plot. It doesn't move, just appears. That's pretty physical, except its meaning (that the couple are going to have sex again and probably get over the post-partum blues) is dependent on the speech that accompanies the disrobing. In fact, the speech is so important, the actor need not have got her kit off, which led to The Guardian moaning about gratuitous female nudity.

I suppose that my instinctive definition was based on the relative importance and attention to physical presence to the overall inpact of the drama. Knee Deep is the most physical piece - it intrigued me because it followed a similar structure to contemporary dance, only used a circus movement vocabulary - and SexLife the least: both Formby and SexLife could be radio plays, I guess. They'd lose something, but Knee Deep and The Static would end up sounding like those episodes of my Radio Hour when the guests don't turn up and I just keep playing records and bits of spoken word recordings.

There's a definition of physical theatre that won't make it into the academic texts. Strike one for the Vile Dictionary.

Five Star Shows

Once upon a time, the quest was to find that Five Star Fringe show. Yesterday, an overheard conversation:

"It's a five star show... please take a flyer."
"Everything has five stars this year. That doesn't mean anything."

Be clear: it's over. The fascination with stars is the product of a community caught in a bubble. Star ratings only have meaning to performers and critics. Audiences no longer care.

The joy of this blog is that I never worked out a way of giving star ratings. I am going to introduce "the vile rating", which will be on an arbitrary scale, or the Fibonacci Sequence. Until I do, I am going to offer opinions and creative responses. I am going to assume that readers of this blog, if they are smart enough to be interested in the work I write about (I mean, there's not much observational comedy here), are smart enough to be able to understand how a review works and go some way towards figuring out whether they's agree with me.

In the meantime, here are five shows with a tangential relationship to the word, concept or object "star".

Miriam Margoyles is a TV star, but also a brilliant actor. She stole the show at The Citizens Theatre last year in Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and her Dickens' Women has had The Skinny reaching for superlatives. Now she is getting on, she has become a National Treasure (as The Skinny's writer Lorna Irvine suggested), and that allows her to carry on how she pleases. This is a one person show, and she switches characters, rescues Dickens from my memories of A Level English and reinvigorates his image as a writer who could capture a character in a few deft strokes, even before he gave them a silly, all-so-meaningful name.

Dickens' Women can be enjoyed as either a contemplation on the great novelist and his gender politics, or a show case for one of Britain's great talents.

Pleasance Courtyard, 8 -25 August

Translunar Paradise is more about the moon than the stars, but this is its third year at the Fringe and it has been instrumental in the growth of the  Lecoq style's popularity in Edinburgh. They use masks like they were puppets and director George Mann was inspired by both his personal experiences with grief and more literary sources.

"It was reading WB Yeats’ The Tower that hardened my resolve to actually write this play," he says. "‘That being dead, we rise, dream and so create, Translunar Paradise’. Yeats’ character, an old man embittered by loss, was the man I wanted to put on stage. I wanted to take this character (and in a way, myself) on a journey that would help him to look positively at life after death." After my fascination with suicide earlier this month, it's probably a good idea for me to see this.

Pleasance Dome, 4 -27 August

George Formby was once the highest paid film star in the UK: his cheeky chappie persona took the magic of the musical hall to the magic of the movies. All players of the tiny little four string special, from Tricity Vogue to that Ukulele Orchestra which turns up on the BBC Culture Show every six months owe Formby, although they pretend not to care. Luckily, his fans have a big gathering in Blackpool every year, and that comedian who likes football did a documentary about him.

This Formby is a one man star by a former star of Matthew Bourne's very important dance company: it's no surprise that when he does a tap dance half way through (he's enacting Formby's courtship of his future wife), he's spectacular. He's got the Formby strumming syncopation off pat, too - it's surprising how jazzy the northern japester could get. There is a lovely scene where his wife teaches him how to play off the beats, and Formby's sweetness is stamped through the middle of the performance, rather like the words in... oh, sorry... a piece of Blackpool rock.

Assembly, 3- 27 August

The company are called Drawn to Stars, so they win the next place on this list. In fact, their press release turned up as I was writing this. So, good work by somebody at their office.

The release starts off badly, because it mentions star ratings, but warms me up by the end when actor Aimee Corbett admits that she is a performance artist and went to Dartington, the sadly amalgamated college which was an English nursery for all sorts of interesting characters - Scottish Live Art Super Group Fish and Game began their careers as students there.

It gets even better when they explain that Now.Here is all about the two hundred mile hobby horse ride made by Corbett and Vanessa Hammick. They picked up a bunch of stories on the way and trained them into a theatrical celebration of "boundaries and borders, long time lovers, gun owners, grannies and angry young men." 

It gets to grips with the English character - appropriately enough in this year when patriotism has made a bit of a comeback. The press release claims it is "the British character" but, frankly, they need to watch their use of that word in Scotland.

Three Sisters, 3 -26 August

My final choice has the potential to be a five star show, at least to the Vile way of thing. LAN-T003 have come from Japan, Jishin uses choreography to explore the 2011 Japanese earthquake: an ephemeral art form to examine a natural force that embodies the Buddhist idea of impermanence in a physical, immersive and immense burst? I think I'll go and see that tonight, just before I take the stage as Criticulous at Summerhall...

Zoo Southside, 3 -27 August

Rating Mania! Five Stars if you mention me.

Now that Lyn Gardner from The Guardian has mentioned it, I feel more comfortable blowing off some steam about star ratings. I mostly love the Fringe because it is the only time that anyone pays much attention to the critics, and I repay the compliment by becoming obsessed with the worth of various magazine's output. Gardner is succinct and subtle: she notes that the stars awarded by the newspapers are "different" to those awarded by the Fringe only publications (the temptation to regard The Herald and Scotsman as more important is rarely avoided by those who have got good ratings from them), before piously hoping that audiences recognise this difference.

My ratings rant is best expressed by way of an example.

 I am just out of Formby, written by and starring Ewan Wardrop. It's a jolly little show, tracing the life of Wigan's comedy ukulele strumming film star. It's tough to get tragedy from Formby's life: he was a success, died soon after his wife and kept clear of any big scandals. His wife and manager Beryl is the acknowledged power behind his cheeky chappy persona and (almost rude) tunes: they had good politics (Beryl annoyed the South African regime) and did sterling work during WWII as entertainers.

For me, it's a solid three stars, if we must. Wardrop hasn't quite got Formby's voice or mannerisms off pat, but his time as part of Matthew Bourne's company pays off when he becomes Beryl and knocks out a tap number. Most importantly, he can tell a good story, charm the crowd  strum the Formby way, catching the syncopation that made his numbers stand out from the clod-hopping beat of most ukulele players.

Of course, that three stars has nothing in common with the three stars I'd give to Do Theatre for Hangman. That has a bigger cast, who poke around at the way that words can replace the thing itself, and, using the children's game as a metaphor, question the power of the word and its absence. It's all dark, very Russian and physical theatre. Although both shows gain my approval because of the way they use movement - and I am judging similar qualities, like performance, or use of the space, or script - one's a cheeky half-hour of fun, the other's a pretty serious provocation.

So, even within one critic's little world, there is variation. All that the stars really add is a slight suggestion of quality. The real reason an audience member goes for one show over another is that they are more interested in the content.

Star inflation is only possible to measure if there is a set of values shared by companies and critics - and I don't even see my star rating as meaning the same thing in different genres. Three stars means good enough, four is a bit more exciting, five means it changed my life... and you ought to see them, if you care about the content.

Besides, stars don't make audiences. There's a show that has nothing but four and five star reviews, from the mainstream and Fringe media. I saw it last night, and there were three other people there.

How many people read the reviews? And how many people read the reviews of reviews? I only wrote this to see whether the other critics would find it.