Day: March 3, 2019

Wild East at the Young Vic review ***

Wild East

Young Vic Theatre, 13th February 2019

So after an hour spent in the florid company of an unraveling traveller couple courtesy of Cuzco at Theatre 503, followed by a hour lapping up the detail of natural and man-made beauty through the eyes of John Ruskin (The Power of Seeing at Two Temple Place – do go – it’s free and open late on Wednesdays) how would the Tourist’s day end?

In the bonkers company of April de Angelis. That’s how. You know how something turns out to be not quite what you expect. This hour or so was exactly that. What with her adaptation of My Brilliant Friend and The Village based on Lope de Veja’s Fuenteovejuna, as well as After Electra, (I haven’t seen her acclaimed play Jumpy), I have been much taken with Ms de Angelis’s work. So I signed up for Wild East reading that it was a satire on the corporate interview, (a comfortable space for a recovering running dog/capitalist lackey). I imagined something along the lines of Jordi Galceran’s play The Gronholm Method which went down well at the Menier Chocolate Factory last year.

Should probably have focussed more on the words “surreal”, “outlandish” and “human chaos”, and the reference to Ionesco, in the Young Vic blurb. For that about sums up Ms Angelis’s three hander which debuted at the Royal Court in 2005. Frank (Zach Wyatt) is plainly nervous as he begins his interview/evaluation with Dr Jacqueline Pitt (Lucy Briers) and Dr Marcia Gray (Kemi-Bo Jacobs). So was I as I realised the creatives weren’t joking when they indicated that this would be old-stool bench seating. The audience in the Clare is ranged around an entirely MDF set courtesy of Sarah Beaton. Nothing else. The Tourist managed to find a perch with some back support but there was still a palpable sense of WTF as the cast emerged from audience. As it turned out props, and in some cases bits of costume, also adopted the plywood aesthetic, though this shifted as the play developed.

Frank is an accidental anthropologist, keen to return to Russia, to help a nameless corporation further its greenwashing agenda. Dr Gray is a stiff-backed stickler for the bureaucratic selection “process”. Dr Pitt is unconvinced by Frank’s credentials but clearly has issues stemming from PTSD after a recent “accident” in Russia. Turns out the two women are past lovers and Frank a pawn in their personal battles even as they plead loyalty to the “bosses” that are watching them as they in turn decide who is next for the chop. Or something like that. The targets of April de Angelis’s ire come thick and fast: anthropology and psychology as marketing technique, “developing markets” environmental cover-ups, learned corporate behaviours, the subjugation of personal identity to organisational process, and so on. But it does get pretty messy and pretty weird, especially when it goes full-on shaman at the end.

These are entirely unbelievable characters so it is just as well that the cast play this up, with Zach Wyatt near mugging the audience with his comic portrayal of Frank, who journeys from nerd to willing yes-man, Kemi-Bo Jacobs sounding like she had just stepped out of a science programme from the 1950s as she tries to staunch her insecurity and Lucy Briers adopting a air of sardonic victimhood throughout. Lekan Lawal as director, (the recipient of this year’s Genesis prize), also runs with the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to interpretation of the play, heightened by the use of microphones for key chunks of dialogue.

Another 90 minutes I wouldn’t have missed but another 90 minutes I won’t get back (nor will, literally, my back). Weird day. Still if you don’t want intellect or lumbar to be challenged you can always stay in and watch an interminable “realistic’ US box set on Netflix. Just like billions of other slack-jawed consumers.

Cuzco at Theatre 503 review ***

Cuzco

Theatre 503, 13th February 2019

Wednesday afternoon. Quite nice weather as I recall. Near the end of the run. No great surprise that Theatre 503, (above the Latchmere in Battersea), was home to just a few, presumably, lost souls including your intrepid correspondent. Hopefully a few more punters pitched up for the more sociable slots as this play, about a couple “finding themselves” on the Inca trail, whilst not overwhelming at the time, has actually, and unexpectedly, lodged in my memory.

It is written by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez, a young playwright with quite a reputation in his native Spain, and here translated by William Gregory. The nameless couple, played here with fearless commitment by Dilek Rose and Gareth Jones, are holed up in a hotel room in Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire, destroyed by the Conquistadors. She is feeling a bit peeky. He is frustrated that he has to go sightseeing on his own. Their relationship is plainly a bit rocky but as She, who is Spanish and riddled with post colonial guilt, rejects the tourist trappings to get “in touch” with the locals, and He contemplates a threesome with a vacuous rich US couple, things start to spiral out of control. She ends up rejecting her life in Europe to “come home” to a world replete with Inca symbolism. He cannot “follow” her and gets increasingly paranoid.

As quotidian dialogue gives way to philosophical monologue the play does go a bit kooky, but its themes still come across clearly and, briskly directed across its 70 minutes by Kate O’Connor, it doesn’t hang about. It did sometimes feel that the writer (and probably the translator) were straining a bit too hard for effect over content, and the simple set of Stephanie Williams, dictated by necessity, constrained the imagination. Mind you Max Pappenheim’s sound design did it best to open up the vistas, geographical and psychological.

Holidays eh. Always bring out the worst in people.

Steve Reich: London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall review ****

London Sinfonietta, Synergy Vocals, Micaela Haslam, Andrew Gourlay (conductor), Sound Intermedia

Royal Festival Hall, 12th February in 2019

Steve Reich

  • Clapping Music
  • Runner for Large Ensemble
  • Music for 18 Musicians

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? The good thing, in this case, being the minimalist music of Steve Reich. There are those music lovers for whom just a few minutes sets their teeth on edge I gather. Not me though. Repetition, repetition, repetition. That’s what I crave. Except that it isn’t really repetitive. It is just structured sound. Built on rhythm. Which evolves. As has Mr Reich’s music. Perfectly demonstrated in this programme.

SR composed Clapping Music in 1972 as an antidote to all the paraphernalia and kit that the Steve Reich Ensemble required to perform his major compositions at that time, (as witnessed by Music for 18 Musicians after the interval). Two performers and their hands. One part fixed, the other repeatedly moving from unison to one beat ahead then back again. Clever clogs. SR, and the two performers here, David Hockings and Tim Palmer. Looks easy? Try it with the help of the app. It isn’t.

Runner for Large Ensemble, of winds, percussion, pianos and strings, is a relatively recent work, from 2016, and comprises five sections played without a pause. The tempo remains broadly constant but note durations vary from sixteenths to eighths to a standard Ghanian bell pattern, (Ghana being the source of many of SR’s works), and then reversed. It ends in the wind section with pulses played for as long as the players can sustain. It is not a long work, 15 minutes or so, and has a little less melodic interest that much of what we might term “late period” Reich (though here’s hoping with having many more compositions to come). This is as close to High Baroque as minimalism gets. I loved it.

Though I could listen to SR’s music all day. As it now seems could half of London. Programmes of Reich and Glass’s music, at least the large scale works, now sell out and audiences are no longer comprised of solitary, rather dubious looking, fifty-something blokes (hello Tourist), but the hip and trendy creative twenty-somethings from East London.

I have blathered on before on this blog about Music for 18 Musicians so I’lll keep this short. This was a turning point for SR as pulse and rhythm of the works from the 1960’s and early 1970s (Piano Phase, Violin Phase, Drumming) was augmented by expanded ideas around structure and, especially, harmony, and electronic intervention was curtailed. The movement between chords is still restricted, but, over the piece, there are repeated cycles of 11 chords, each held for two “breaths” from the voices and wind section(clarinets) which the strings follow. The 4 pianos and the mallet instruments deliver a regular rhythmic pulse, and, as the chords are stretched out, small “pieces” in arch form are built on top to create harmony and changes in instrumentation. The effect is like early polyphonic voice compositions with a cantus firmus overlaid with instrumental “melismas”. The sections are divided by cues from the mettalophone who becomes a sort of director and the modulations within chords are marshalled by the bass clarinet. here Timothy Lines. (Andrew Gourlay only conducted Runner).

All clear. It takes a few listens to get the picture and even then it is easy to get lost in the apparent repetition but it helps to get the map in mind. Then the choreography of sound (and movement as percussionists shift position), the way the focus and texture of the sound shifts across the ensemble, becomes clearer, and moves beyond the “hypnotic wash”. Understanding the process reveals the beauty. At least that’s what I think. Synergy Vocals lead by Michaela Haslam are the world’s experts in Reich’s work and the London Sinfonietta has form in Reich too, and together they were, mostly faultless in delivering the seamless ebbe and flow of the music.