Hello Matt! Post Critical Team Sports, anyone?

In an interesting video blog, Matt Trueman suggests that criticism can be a team sport. He covers the challenges of the internet age, but then suggests that each review ought to refer to previous reviews of the same show, developing a kind of dialogue between critics and the work, and avoiding duplication of content


So, I am going to respond to one of his articles and see what happens. Apart from being sued by Fest for ripping off a big chunk of their copyrighted material...

The Post Show

By Matt Trueman

Published 05 August 2014 In Fest

This semi-improvised post-show talk is an almost-inspired format

How has no one done this before now? An improvised post-show discussion. The format’s inspired: recognisable, structured and ripe for ridicule.

Actually, someone totally did. Rob Drummond and David Overend did it at The Arches. But, interesting, Trueman and I start with the same statement, that the idea is ripe for comedy. Here's my introduction...

The painful tradition of the post-show discussion is ripe for deconstruction: playing on the vanity of the artists, it invariably becomes a dreary round of predictable questions and self-satisfied responses. Under the guise of the Shallow Scream Ensemble, The Berserker Residents have fun sending up the pretension of the serious artist, without delving deeper into the processes of creation.

The company display a real skill in improvising to the audience's questions, before segueing into a series of scenes that expose the actors' neediness and vulnerability. Aiming for broad comedy rather than insightful takes on the theatre industry, Post Show is more slapstick than satire, and entertains through the absurdity of the characters and their desperate attempts to wrest meaning from their mundane anxieties.

Of course, we haven’t actually seen the show under discussion and the actors haven’t actually performed it. It’s only through our questions—Could you just explain the half-hour section in Spanish? How did you manage to piss off both Christians and Satanists?—and their fanciful answers, that the full horror of what’s just occurred onstage becomes apparent.

Synopsis... nice and clear, too. 

We enter just in time to catch the tail-end of the final scene: a bafflement of backstories, unseen characters and established conventions. Tonight, it’s Prodigal Father: a six-hour tale of two brothers, their comatose mum, abusive dad and a physical theatre "safe space". Also, it seems: raft merchants, yoga instructors and, er, a demon mother.

Actually, this team criticism is kinda boring. What can I add to this? It's all there... he's right. Synopses are unnecessary to be repeated. Back to my response, I think.

The audience are guided into the auditorium with the performance already in progress: the tail end of a Sam Shepherd-style conflict of masculinity which has apparently been running for the previous six hours. Cutting quickly to the post-show discussion, the show proper reveals the emotional traumas, egotism and neuroses that drive the production.

Yet, brilliantly, the three members of "Shallow Scream Ensemble Theatre Collective" justify every element with that laughable luvvie indulgence. Whatever you throw at them—dance sequences, deus ex machina—they’ll defend the decision to the hilt, convinced of their own genius.

The company display a real skill in improvising to the audience's questions, before segueing into a series of scenes that expose the actors' neediness and vulnerability.


As so often with improv, though, you wish The Beserker Group were stricter with their resorts to surrealism. The more plausible the play, the better the comic bullseye.


However, The Post Show is only semi-improvised. Here and there, it swerves into scripted sketch territory and, while that can be amusing on its own terms, it does confuse the form. Moments you thought improvised turn out to be plot points and, for all the laughs, you leave feeling duped.


Aiming for broad comedy rather than insightful takes on the theatre industry, Post Show is more slapstick than satire, and entertains through the absurdity of the characters and their desperate attempts to wrest meaning from their mundane anxieties.

Audio Anguish #34

Cained, Again by Gareth K Vile on Mixcloud

There is a prize for the person who identifies the play. And the language it is in. And why I thought that it was a good idea to make an hour fifteen version of a script in a language I neither speak nor understand. 

Wanted: beautiful and intelligent companion, GSOH, interested in the arts to join intense and tarnished romantic for horror and pretentious conversation.

EVENT PREVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 22 MARCH 2010

It must be time for me to start dating again. Andrew Campbell and Warcry productions are putting on Cleansed by Sarah Kane. Since Kane is my favourite dramatist, and Cleansed is possibly her most outrageous script, the choice of Sloans bar for venue fills me with a sense of dramatic irony and burgeoning romance. Cleansed, like much of Kane, abstracts the raw brutality into a vague environment – it could be a university, a clinic, a concentration camp. The students, the patients, the inmates rape, kill and love each other, become each other. And even though Kane commands language with supernatural skill, the nature of her scripts – terse, suggestive – allow directors to find their own path through the production, lending the experience a harsh, experimental edge.

It’s a bastard hour: her only script that I can’t read for pleasure. She goes further in her depiction of cruelty, picking up on Edward Bond’s viciousness and excising the failing hope that glimmers in Crave or4.48. While love is projected as the only hope, it can barely face down the repeated acts of violence that dominate the opening scenes. EvenBlasted, her first work that was roundly condemned, has an erotic itch – corrupted and sick, but alive. The desire in Cleansed is for the dead, for death, a ghastly vision of passion as dislocated body parts and tormented lust.

By setting the action in an institution, Kane’s savagery goes beyond personal and political intent, imagining human culture and civilisation as a mere machine for enforcing submission and stripping us of our agency, our hopes, our desires. She is relentlessly anti-humanist, diving into a metaphysical world where the fundamental nature of the human is examined and found bitter. It is intensely spiritual – not in the twee new age euphemism for optimistic and lacking rigour, but in the dark longing of God’s absence.

When a production is successful, as in Edinburgh University’s 4.48, the audience can leave the theatre uplifted with the thrill of having survived extremity. It’s a cliché that a play can force discussion and so intimacy and connection. Yet in Kane’s intensity, talking is the only solution. Her language is an infection, an inoculation. This, of course, makes it perfect for a first date. A ticket is available for anyone glamorous and brave enough to join me for an unflinching gawk at the horror and, even worse, a post-play discussion with the Performance Editor.

 EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 01 APRIL 2010

Enter Sarah and Gareth. They are shackled together. Naked, they recall the Rider Waite Tarot card of The Devil.

Sarah: Do you trust me?
Gareth: Yes. But why?
Sarah: You trust me because I write so well. You trust me because you recognise the things I describe.
Gareth: I don’t recognise this place.
Sarah: It’s a university.
Gareth: It looks like a concentration camp.
Sarah: What’s the difference?

Black out. Loud electronic music. Lights up, The Red Room. Grace is having sex with her brother, while a retarded boy, in a dress, swings from the ceiling on a pair of tights.
Black out. Loud electronic music. Lights up. Sarah and Gareth again.

Gareth: An hour and a half’s a bit long for this.
Sarah: Too weak to take it?
Gareth: It’s a good idea to read out the stage directions rather to act them. It saves the actors having to actually mutilate themselves.
Sarah: Why do you insist on considering Cleansed as a play? My pain transcends theatre. I am on the point of transforming the script into something like your beloved Live Art.
Gareth: You were consciously copying other authors. Edward Bond. Beckett. You even used Shakespeare to defend your stage directions. Just because you were clinically depressed didn’t mean that you weren’t literary.
Sarah: So how many stars are you going to give me?

Black out. Loud electronic music. Lights up, The White Room. Tinker and a gay male couple.

Tinker: I’m a doctor. I’m not a doctor. I hate women.
Gay Male Couple: We understand that sado-masochism is not a matter of whips and chains, but the deeper torments of the mind. One of us ends up dead, the other loses hands, feet and tongue.
Tinker: We are all symbols of internal and external expression. I might be God.

Black out. Sarah and Gareth.

Gareth: Do you remember when we met at The Scala cinema, In King’s Cross?
Sarah: They were showing Pasolini’s Salo. I was the only woman in the audience.
Gareth: And I was the only man not wearing a mackintosh and furtively touching himself.
Sarah: You were a boy.
Gareth: You could have stayed the next morning.
Sarah: How would it have been different?
Gareth: You might still be here.
Sarah: Because I needed you? And I’d be writing adaptations of classics for the NTS.
Pause.
Sarah: Would you have died for me?
Gareth: I would have said that I would.
Sarah: From the man who lasted nine seconds when he was waterboarded.

Black out. Lights up. The chocolate room. The retarded boy is eating an entire box of chocolates to a loud, swirling soundtrack.

Audience member: PLEASE TURN THE FUCKING MUSIC OFF. IT IS DISTRACTING ME FROM THE EXTENDED HORROR OF THE FORCED FEEDING.

Black out. Lights up. Gareth and Sarah.

Gareth: Is it true that Tinker was named after a critic from The Daily Mail?
Sarah: These days, I’d write a witty acoustic song about it and put it on YouTube.
Gareth: We don’t do sincerity in the twenty-first century.
Sarah: That’s why you don’t have any good script-writers.
Gareth: You know, they were just boys. You needed an older lover, et c.
Sarah: I needed God. And He’s dead.
Gareth: This is your worst play.
Sarah: And so my most honest.
Gareth: It needs to be under-played.

Black out. Lights up. The Yellow room. Sounds of amputation, and screams. Grace is naked, with tits and cock.

Grace: (sings) All you love is need. All you love is need. Need, need: need is all you love.

Black out. Lights up. Gareth and Sarah.

Sarah: It’s not as bad as my version of Hippolytus.
Gareth: You hadn’t bothered to read the original.
Sarah: So what? I just fancied having a Greek hero wanking into a sock. You’d prefer a reverential version?
Gareth: I love everything you wrote, Sarah.
Sarah: Does that mean you are going to rape me?

Black out. Pause. Lights up. The stage is scattered with Tinker’s mad eyes, melted chocolate, piss, flames, feet, hands, half a tongue, blood which smells of tomato puree, the dead bodies of the cast. Gareth and Sarah again.

Gareth: They really went for it.
Sarah: I hate actors.
Gareth: Why else would you have written Cleansed?
Sarah: I do to actors what God did to me.
Gareth: Force them through a script that they can’t hope to escape?
Sarah: If God existed, that is what He did. But God is dead.
Gareth: You killed yourself because you had such a strong identification with God?
Sarah: I killed myself because... have you looked out the window lately?
Gareth: You killed yourself because you picked up a copy of Hello! Magazine in the STD waiting room?
Sarah: I saw what was coming. God is dead, and Jordan is sitting in His throne. If God is Love, then Love is dead. In the gap, there is need. Society weeds out the capable. Society destroys God.

Gareth: Sarah? It’s Easter.

Two Comedians

 I sat next to Jim Davidson once. I was at the Pavilion pantomime, and he was wearing a pair of flashing bunny ears and getting very involved in the back and forth between the audience and the stage. It was just before his arrest, so I don't think that he is going to mention it on his new tour.

Eddie Izzard and I were once at the same gig, dressed as women. I think that is a story for another time.

However... both of them are coming to Scotland to tell jokes. Funnily enough, Jim has said he doesn't mind the idea of Scottish Independence, while Eddie Izzard's gig in Edinburgh is all about persuading the Scots to stay in the Union. Let's compare and contrast press releases.

Very few comedians could turn the worst year of their life into a resounding success, but fresh from winning the most successful ever series of Big Brother by a landslide, comedy king Jim Davidson has done exactly that. Jim will take No Further Action on a 54 date UK tour, starting at the Great Yarmouth Britannia Pier on 5 September 2014.

Better Together today announced that comedy legend Eddie Izzard will be hosting a one off gig on Friday, April 4th at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh to launch a campaign for people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who don't want Scotland to leave the UK.Please Don't Go is the title of the special gig, but also the name of the campaign that will run between now and September’s vote. The purpose of this campaign for people in the rest of the UK is to make sure that people who don't have a vote in the referendum still have the opportunity to play their part in keeping our family of nations together.

On announcing the new show, Jim said “It was an interesting time, I had a rough ride for a while, but it’s great to be back on stage doing what I love, and the best way of dealing with a nightmare is to talk about it! I always seem to find the funny side of things...even this! And then, for a finale, along came Big Brother! Wait to you hear the inside stories on that!”

Speaking as he announced the special show, Eddie Izzard said: “I won’t have a vote in the Scottish referendum. What I do have is a view and a voice. I totally respect that this will be a decision for the Scottish people but I love Scotland far too much to stay quiet about how I feel.”

Welcoming the announcement, the leader of Better Together Alistair Darling said: “I’m delighted that Eddie is taking part in this hugely important campaign. People in the rest of the UK may not have a vote in September, but they do have a voice. If Scotland leaves the UK it will have a massive impact on the whole country.”

No stranger to the limelight, having dominated prime time TV comedy for over a decade, Jim is not only one of the country’s best established comics, but one of the most popular stand-up comedians of all time. Alongside hosting much loved shows such as Big Break and The Generation Game Jim’s sell-out theatre tours and pantomimes have broken box office records and received critical acclaim.

“From Stornoway and Lerwick to Glasgow and Edinburgh, I have been lucky enough to play more venues in

Scotland than most Scottish comedians,” adds Izzard.  “As I did my marathons around the UK I felt really proud to be able to run in Scotland holding aloft the Saltire and to still feel that this was my country.”

During the 80s Jim travelled the world performing for the troops, taking his top quality entertainment to some of the most inhospitable places imaginable. For this he was made an OBE. Now his time in Big Brother has come to an end, this brilliant comedian is back where he belongs – on stage, entertaining audiences around the country.

“I’m proud to be British but I am also proud of Britain. I love the vibrant, tolerant, diverse, confident, country we have become. British patriotism is so quiet and understated that it is flexible enough to bring people together. It has always been possible to feel British while being proudly Scottish, Welsh or English. Today our country embraces Mo Farah, a Somali-born distance runner as a British Olympic hero without a second thought. We can even cheer a far-slower marathon-running transvestite comedian.”

No Further Action will see Jim tell the story of his arrest and the nightmare 12 months that followed, the clearing of his name and winning the heart of the nation all over again as a Big Brother champion. Jim will be doing all this in the only way he knows how, by entertaining people, something he’s been doing to great acclaim for nearly 40 years. It promises to be the most outrageous, hilarious and insightful show Jim has ever performed, but most of all it will be the truth.

“I think most people across the UK would feel a deep sense of loss if Scotland left. Opinion polls in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK show a majority of people want the UK to stay together. There are economic and practical reasons for sticking together. Sharing risks, resources and rewards makes us all stronger. Whether it's paying the pensions of our old people or helping young people into a job, working together across 63 million people makes sense.”