Dunsinane: Uncut

Although Dave Greig’s sequel to Macbeth imagines a Scotland occupied by an English army, and tautly deconstructs the brutality inherent in even the most honourable military morality, Dunsinane is a wryly understated argument against Scottish cultural independence. Co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre of Scotland, with a cast drawn from England and Scotland, this engaged drama by Caledonia’s most prominent playwright depends on the original by Albion’s master of the stage for its emotional impact, while Greig’s own honesty prevents him from caricaturing the English as oppressors. While it traces the roots of Border Warfare back to an mythical aetiology, the tension between the neighbouring nations is more an offshoot of Scotland’s fratricidal battles and the invaders’ lack of cultural sensitivity than any inherent conflict between two countries.

Politics is far too important to be left to politicians and media commentators: Greig’s nuanced reading of the tensions between states and individuals clearly demonstrates how theatre encourages more complex analysis. By firmly identifying with the soldiers caught up in a battle they do not understand, rescuing Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s slanders and giving English commander Siward a tragic depth that compels him to do evil in the service of a perceived greater good, Greig is neither sentimental about Scotland’s past, nor unwilling to draw parallels with modern global conflicts. Echoes of military adventures in the Middle East, and the revolutions in Africa draw no easy conclusions: the new broom is already tarnished and corrupt, and the defeated tyranny remains potent and popular. If there is a message, it is a plea for rounded vision.

Running at over two hours, Dusinane consists of two plays, somewhat uneasily joined: a tragicomedy of the troops, and the almost classical tragedy of Siward and Lady Macbeth. Part medieval Blackwatch and part bold rewriting of Scottish legend, some of the characterisation, especially of King Malcolm is too inconsistent, bending to the demands of the themes: and the humour often sits uneasily with the more melodramatic confrontations. The acting, although brilliant across the cast, is uneven in tone: Brian Ferguson’s decadent monarch is dryly hilarious, where Jonny Phillips pulls off Shakespearean grandeur. But while they never coalesce as an ensemble, they lend the play an uneasy tone, echoing the broader sense of political confusion. And in those moments where it works, as in a sudden shift from flirtatious banter to suicidal terrorism, it heightens the emotional impact.

Greig may not be imitating Shakespeare, but the debt he owes to Macbeth emphasises that this is a self-conscious attempt to make a major Scottish play. That it is built on an English original serves to stress the way that Scottish identity is tangled in a wider British identity: the passages of Gaelic, and the brilliant use of traditional song, combine with the English squaddies’ alienation from the Highlands to locate Scotland as not merely English with an accent, and further complicates Greig’s take on nationhood. Fierce and thoughtful, intelligent and inconclusive, Dunsinane may be Greig’s most important work to date, and he is never disappointed by either the production or the performers.

Although his producer Harry has betrayed him by heading off to Cornwall for a weekend in the surf, Vile has taken this week's show very seriously. He is digging out tracks by Can and Lydia Lunch to preview upcoming gigs, inviting guest presenters from the worlds of contemporary dance and science fiction, buffing up his interviews with the cast of the NTS' Dunsinane and extending invitations to Flatrate Theatre, Virginia Gallery, Nick Spaghetti (who is bringing North American War ) and Andrea Marini. As usual, he takes Harry's holiday as an excuse to overload the Hour. 

"We've been running the show for nearly six months now," he begins. "In that time, Harry and I have made the move from spending two hours talking about the tunes we have just played and what party he is crashing that weekend towards something that vaguely mirrors the dynamic hustle of Glasgow. And yet..." He trails off into silence.

"It's not enough?"

"I did this list of all of our guests a few weeks ago. That was the first time I realised what we were doing. I mean, I have always had this vision: an online radio show that brought together the arts communities of the West Coast, that bickered with Pop Goes The Revolution about South West identity, matched an efficient technology hipster against a balding performance critic and leapt between local bands and contemporary classical music. But now... there is something, just at the edge of my sight, a looming presence."

"Don't the pills help with that?" 

"It is all very well to address my anxiety through medication. It's Glasgow that is the problem. It's the second biggest centre of the arts in the UK, after London, and I can't cover it all. This week, we go visual art through the Virginia Gallery - "

"An exhibition of Painted Ladies? How very Vile Arts."

"Then Flatrate are actually doing what I wish more theatre groups would do: getting their work into the pubs. We go all National with Dunsinane, over to Edinburgh for some Mutationpress action with Mark Harding. As for music, I only heard of Andrea Marini on Twitter this week, and I have a new guest for the show."

"That might say more about your knowledge than anything else. I take it you have heard of The North American War?"

"I am their friends on MySpace."

"But what do you really want to do?"

"I want to tell the world about Glasgow."

"And get sponsorship for your hare-brained schemes, no doubt. Anyway," said the doctor, removing his rubber gloves. "You can pull your trousers up now and I'll see you next month."

War On Art "Will Be Over By Christmas" Promise Shady Cabal

A highly sinister group of celebrities, who cannot be named due to super-injunctions, have declared that their "war on art" is entering its final stages.

The cabal, who influence policy by making contributions to political parties and writing open letters to newspapers and the government, have been instrumental in the ongoing battle against people leaving their homes and watching live performance since the invention of television.

"Like all wars, this one has been good for the economy and has propelled technological innovation," announced a figure wearing a football shirt. "When we began our campaign, we relied on poor transport infrastructures and some black and white films of a potter's wheel. Now we have the internet, cable pumping out shit on an infinite number of channels and a systematic attack on arts funding. We are almost sorry to announce our victory."

The cabal went on to admit that pockets of resistance were a necessary consequence of the triumph. "By leaving isolated groups of cabaret, theatre and music performers at large, we are able to cream them off to create the next generation of light entertainment minor irritants."

Although it was controversial at the time, amongst the five or six people who noticed it, the War Against Art is regarded as a necessity across the political spectrum. Live Performance is seen to encourage groups of people to assemble in public places and either enjoy themselves and thereby create a community outside of easy consumer control, or engage in a contemplative manner with serious issues.

There have been serious setbacks over the years. In the late 1980s, Rave Culture inspired a generation to take drugs and dance about in fields, while making vague gestures towards a culture of equality and creativity. Luckily, the ill-formed laws against repetitive beats combined with a campaign to glamorise binge drinking to dissolve this fragile community into competing groups of serious electronica fans and pissed up clubbers.

However, the Government, which somehow has the same policies whoever gets voted in, demonstrated a rare example of joined up thinking by expanding the public subsidy for arts in a time of prosperity. Not only did this distract many artists from making political work, it encouraged grant junkies and administrative staff to out-number the actual artists within the arts. When the funding started to be cut, many artists were no longer able to imagine ways of funding their projects, and joined Facebook groups instead of considering Performative ways of protesting.

"It's been a difficult half century," admitted one source. "But now we can all get back to watching TV and buying crap off the internet."

I'd Skip this One, if I Were You

Most of the time, I call myself a Platonist  - which makes those frequent comments by women that they would like to remain “platonic friends” all the more ironic. In reality, this means that I once read The Republic and got over-excited by the deconstruction of ideas: in practice, I wander about shouting that we are all living under a delusion enforced by the tyranny of television, which Plato clearly predicted in his parable of the cave.

Quite how this impacts on theatre criticism is open to question. Apart from those difficult paragraphs where Plato explicitly rejects the presence of actors in his perfect state - luckily, I think he was joking most of the time – Plato didn’t set out a specific approach to performance. It is a far cry from his jilted student Aristotle, who ruined theatre criticism by insisting on all sorts of perfections and strictures, mainly to get back at Plato for dismissing theatre, but also to justify his subjective opinion that Oedipus Rex is the best play ever written.

Oedipus is a great play, but there is no need to make up an entire system of analysis to prove it. Sadly for Aristotle, he couldn’t get a gig writing reviews for The Scotsman and his opinions needed to be made of sterner stuff before they could irredeemably influence generations of makers and audiences. Slapping down “the unities” of time, place and plot, and slicing the possible plots into moral categories is fine for an afternoon’s drinking conversation, but there is no reason for playwrights or critics – or teachers of Classical Civilisation – to take it seriously.

Perhaps the reason that Plato didn’t spend time deciding how to analyse and undermine theatre is that he was a bit touchy about his past. It says on the internet somewhere that Plato had been an unsuccessful playwright before meeting Socrates, who tried to cheer him up by taking him to a party. Given that he went on to write most of his philosophy as dialogues – so similar to the central scene in most Greek tragedies where the competing visions fight it out before someone’s mother rips their head off – and that his writing is littered with allusion to poetry and tragedy, it’s not unreasonable to think that Plato’s anti-drama stance is more notional than serious. Frankly, it is just a relief that Plato didn’t leave us with a huge body of dogmatic opinion to test performance.

The little Plato that I read in the Beginner’s Guide, however, is instructive. He does blather about the age-old battle between poetry and philosophy every so often, but that seems to me an unnecessary division between genres - the sort of thing Aristotle was far better at, anyway. His most famous pronouncement, that he would ban theatre from his ideal state, mostly on the grounds that it is a lie, deserves a little investigation.

First of all, Plato explicitly admits that the actor is a skilled professional: he even goes so far as to say that he would praise them before booting them out of the city. He then acknowledges that the theatre’s threat is in the impact it might have on the citizens, what with its portrayal of good men being done over by the gods, or the promulgation of ideas that don’t fit in the proto-totalitarian machine that he appears to be advocating.

Since he said all this in the context of defining his perfect society – and contradicting himself from chapter to chapter on everything from women’s rights to the right place for dancing girls at a dinner party – it strikes me that Plato took theatre far more seriously than most modern political thinkers. I checked out most of the manifestos at the last election, and they contained platitudes about the necessity of state support. Assuming that we can count politicians as “thinkers” in any meaningful respect, they accept the liberal idea that “art is a good thing”. They probably have some theory that it can be used to promulgate social cohesion.

I’ve watched a great deal of performance, had a few tragedies in my life, and agree with Plato. Art is fucking dangerous. Music persuades youngsters that rebellion is a good idea. Pop music sells shoddy consumer products. If art had no impact on our behaviour, there would not be adverts in the cinema. The very environment of art makes us vulnerable to persuasion.

As it goes, I don’t believe Plato wanted to kick the artists out: even if he did, his ideal government is pretty much the model for complete state control, so we can reject many of his conclusions. If he hated tragedians so much, he wouldn’t have quoted them so often, and imitated their style. It is better to think of him as a satirist than a philosopher, and have the salt handy. I think that this passage is more a melodramatic allegory, emphasising the importance of art in shaping opinion, and also its potential as a counter-cultural force.

So this is where my Big Theory comes in. When I taught Plato – once, in a last minute panic revision session at a Masonic School in Hertfordshire – my students suggested that the “Noble Lie” is the clue to Plato’s entire philosophy. I was drinking wine in a cloister, watching the sunset and surrounded by occult symbolism cast in stone: the perfect moment to adopt a teenager’s hunch as a foundation for my entire belief system.

Having spent most of The Republic detailing the hierarchies of a super state, based on reason, Plato slips in this little cheat. Social cohesion will not be developed through rationality. Instead, he makes up a major bullshit, something to do with DNA and precious metals, and some character having a daytrip to the afterlife.

Never mind that the story is less plausible, and open to less amusing jokes, that the ones about Zeus seducing women disguised as a golden shower: Plato has just undermined his entire project for a rational state. If a philosopher did that these days, he’d get a bad review in The Guardian, get an article in the Daily Mail with the headline EXPERT SAYS THINKING INCREASES CANCER RISK and end up as a MEP for UKIP. Back in the day, it meant that thousands of earnest men in bed sheets built their world view around it, ignoring Plato’s early invention of surrealism.

Reading Plato is like having a big argument with a dead man. You can’t negotiate details, push him on finer points and, after a while, it starts to stink. The Republic is an infuriating mess of contradictions, all of which are internally coherent. It makes you think.

And that, I contest, was his point. The Republic isn’t a handbook for the ideal state – even Plato mistook it, had a little political adventure and nearly ended up dead. It is a text-book for teaching dialectic – resolving problems through argument. Frankly, the dialectic in the book is terrible: Socrates and a bunch of cheerleaders. It’s the dialectic in the mind of the reader that is the point.

So that’s it. Platonic criticism is about a dialogue. I needed a thousand words to say this, claim a heavy duty precedent just to prove I am not a moron. And a Platonic Performance Criticism engages with the relationship between form and function, grapples with the issues of a Performance not its relative quality – which is why I either ignore things like “good direction” or get names wrong – and exists in the point of contact between audience and event.

Discuss.

In the Penal Colony

I watch performance in a desperate attempt to feel something. A constant stream of internet information, romantic failures, continued disappointment at the idiocy of elected politicians, a nagging sense of self-doubt and mounting financial concerns have conspired to convince me that an emotional numbness is the only way to exist. A night out at the theatre isn’t a gentle entertainment anymore. It is my last, best hope for feeling.

Opera works well for this. At the very least, it is a reminder of emotions I want to inhabit: huge passions, absurd expression, hopeless desire and tremendous waves of sound. And Philip Glass delivers wave of repetitive energy, working and reworking a small study of notes, building over time towards a final, deliberate moment of revelation and disgust.

When Kafka wrote about a brutal execution machine, he adorned his short story with typically obscure motifs and symbolism. When Philip Glass wrote an opera based on the story, he stripped it back to his usual minimalist intensity, turning Kafka’s meditation on the nature of punishment into an argument between a stern traditionalist and an uncertain liberal observer.

Music Theatre Wales are known for their stripped down approach to opera, and Glass’ clipped intent suits their style: the line from Kafka’s original through the score to Michael McCarthy’s direction is clear and sharp. The two singers move between torture table, ladder and around the voiceless prisoner: the certainty of the warden is slowly undermined by the discomfort of the observer. The subtexts, the passions, the violence itself, are all subsumed beneath Glass’ urgent and mesmeric strings.

For the first hour, the libretto sets up a moral conundrum. Is it still acceptable for punishment to be merely punitive, or must it be redemptive? In the last moments, the warden inevitably finds himself at the mercy of his own ideas, his own machine. As the blood drips down onto his back, the horrible revelation, that is no revelation, is unfolded. For all his talk of the morality of his justice, the warden is wedded to horror, not reform.

I write about performance in a desperate attempt to express something of what I have experienced. Yet, through Glass’ score, McCarthy’s direction and the musicians’ intensity, I am brought back to my own state of numbness. It is as if In the Penal Colony is reflecting my own shock and dislocation, resolving nothing and proving only that horror itself is merely anaesthetising.