The Under Room and The Fool, Cock Tavern Theatre

The middle pair of plays in the Cock Tavern's Edward Bond season are very different pieces, one a chamber piece written in 2005 (and now receiving its London premier), the other an epic play first performed by at the Royal Court in 1975. Seeing them close together allows one to focus on how Bond's writing had developed in the intervening period and how he had, by the time of the chronologically latter play incorporated within his dramaturgy what I can only describe as a performed self-consciousness as to what the drama is (what Drama itself is, Bond would say).

The smaller play is The Under Room, and was performed in the cellar of the pub theatre, a location reached by going upstairs, through the regular theatre space and down again into an under room throbbing with the sound of a generator, a rectangular space with low ceilings. On the night I saw the play (the first performance of this production) the cast of The Fool with Bond himself sat directing them were rehearsing as we passed, a weirdly ghostly and haunting scene in an of itself. A complete naïf might have asked "what are they doing?" and then might, with some thought, have found the answer to that downstairs in The Under Room.


The Under Room, like most late Bond plays, is set in a dystopia which is easily believable and which would be arrived at quite quickly should a further financial collapse hit the West's economy. A police state runs Britain and, in an Orwellian act terrifying in its simplicity, allows itself to summarily shoot anyone shoplifting as the crime has been renamed "shop-looting". The story concerns one shop-looter who hides in the basement of a single woman's home and is discovered by her. The singleton, Joan, is extremely leery of the stranger at first but gradually gets drawn into his story. His is a non-European whose past has involved being a boy-soldier, whose first killing for the army who kidnapped him was one of his own parents. The stranger embroils Joan in his situation, involving her in the shady deal his is trying to pull of with a treacherous black-marketer named Jack. Jack is supposed to get the stranger a passport and a way out of the UK but instead rips off his money and blackmails Joan to find more. The stranger's presence in both Jack and Joan's life reveals them.

I structure this last sentence in the way I have so that I can get into talking about the play's central innovation – the stranger is represented by a dummy, his lines being spoken by an actor who stands to the side of the action. This simple device makes what could have been simply a representation of a dramatic situation into a way of thinking about what we do when we represent dramatic situations. Joan and Jack are revealed, they and we find out who they are by their interaction with this effigy. Of course, all dramatic characters are effigies or dummies and the dramas we watch them perform reveal the character of the other figures in the drama. There is something else though – the audience as well is pretending that these characters are real in order to find out something about themselves through the drama: Bond is conscious of the Greek beginnings of dramatic theatre, its coincidence with the beginnings of democratic society and citizenship and the imperative to "Know Thyself".  The dramatic process towards the somewhat ironic ending of The Under Room allows Joan and Jack to find out that she is a person that wanted to help the stranger for rather selfish reasons  - as an end to her singleton existence becoming a couple running away together – whereas Jack is someone who, when called to quit his low down ways and attempt make a positive contribution world with the stranger, finds himself drawn to the stranger's violently unexpected offer. Yet Jack doesn't get the chance to do this, as Joan has ripped the dummy to pieces once she finds herself rejected.

There seems to me to be a mordant critique of contemporary drama built into this. Joan's liberal selfishness, in which motives are more to do with personal wishes and ownership of the other, destroys the opportunity for Jack to change. One of the things this suggests to me is that contemporary drama, in concentrating on a liberal sentiment which demands that the "victims" of the present system be given to them as personal projects, decimates a more immediate drama which might affect a change in the aggressors and the victims themselves. It is certainly true that much of the liberal, soul-searching drama we see points towards liberal consciousness raising amongst the already-liberal middle-classes. Bond's rather caustic suggestion is that these liberals will, rather than give up their hold on the puppet strings of the victimized classes, align themselves with the extreme right and become victimizers themselves.

This could be seen as a rather despairing vision. In his programme note on Hope, Bond writes "The hope is in the audience." The very process of watching The Under Room might change an individual, or at least get them to take a good, hard look at themselves. Maybe that's hoping too much, although I can affirm that it got me feeling and thinking…

The Fool is as epic as The Under Room is condensed; it's concern is with the producer of art in society whereas, for me, The Under Room is concerned with the audience. The play tells, in eight scenes, the story of the 19th century peasant poet John Clare, staging his fringe involvement with the rural protest movement against land enclosures. The land enclosure theme, the central role given to a "great British writer" and the subtitle, Scenes of Bread and Love, show The Fool to be somewhat of a companion piece to Bond's Shakespeare play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death; Clare's own position as a "nobody" elevated by his talent into the world of the gentry and ruling class make his position somewhat analogous to a Shakespearean fool. Bond directed the Cock Tavern production himself (replacing the advertised director) and did a brilliant job of making this huge play work in the small, pub theatre space; it is an irony that his programme note also includes a satirical pop at the National Theatre, who wanted to do The Fool in the Olivier Theatre but were refused by Bond with a curt

‘You cannot do My Fair Lady one day and Macbeth the next: you cannot be Van Gogh one day and paint green-faced oriental ladies the next. You have to choose, and if you don’t what you do chooses you’. (Saunders, 2004)

The Fool is a intricately patterned play. Clare is shown as a player in a class struggle, contrasted and compared with other players (notably the agitator Darkie) and shown in antagonism with his class enemies, who are ironically also his patrons and benefactors. It is significant, for Bond as a stage writer himself and for a comparison with Bingo, that the first time we see Clare he is taking part in a Mummers play performed for the local Lord of the Manor and his preening houseguests (perhaps this is analogous to Bond's early involvement with productions of his plays at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare company). There is a sense within the play that people are locked into their class positions, that they cannot leave them behind nor see beyond them – it is perhaps the most self-consciously Marxist of Bond's plays in terms of how its structure stages the class struggle. This might be problematic in that the play may box in its audience – yet the play is part of not the completion of a process. It is right that Bond on occasion provokes us into thinking about how at liberty a person can be in a class society. He offers a powerful rebuttal of the idea that a person can, in such an environment, be in charge of their own destiny.

The play includes two of Bond's most powerful scenes. In one, the rioting rural workers come across a country parson – an apologist for the ruling class – and proceed to strip him of his finery; when he is naked, they weep as they pluck at his well-fed flesh, mourning that its plenty has been at the expense of them and their children. The scene is striking and unforgettable – the parson (not a sympathetic character) is vulnerable and almost Christ-like in his suffering but his attackers maintain an innocence and child-like quality, as if the Church's Jesus-surrogate were being suffered to come unto the children. There's also a sense in which the scene links to those zombie films, for example Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground or Romero's Land of the Dead, in which the zombies are used to symbolize the exploitation and revolt of the proletariat against their class oppressors, as Bond's worker's come close to wrenching the parson's flesh from his bones.

The other great scene – as great a scene as has ever been written for the theatre – has Clare taking the air with his upper class patrons in Hyde Park where a vicious boxing match happens to be taking place. The boxers are two prime examples of the victims of English Imperialism – an African and an Irishman – and the alternation of focus between Clare and his literary friends and the participants in the boxing match creates a split of focus which (via their on-stage proximity) encourages an audience  to see the connection between the two groups and their ostensibly dissimilar activities.

Bond's large scale dramas often deal in the on-stage relationships between groups, relationships which stage the economic and social relationships within the societies he is writing about. The Cock Tavern production shows that Bond, even in such a tiny performing space, is adept at grouping his actors in meaningful constellations. The production gives the lie to the idea that Bond is not a good director for his work; here, he shows that he has reached a level of impressive understanding of the stage space and its dynamics, where space and communication consummate a meaningful relationship. That we are unlikely to see him showing us what space we can do on a large scale is a terrible loss for anyone interested in theatre in the UK.

Bibliography
Saunders, G. (2004). 'Edward Bond and the Celebrity of Exile'. Theatre Research International , 29, pp. 256–266.

The Pope's Wedding and Olly's Prison, Cock Tavern Theatre

The Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn is currently producing a season of the plays of Edward Bond, one play representing each of the decades in which he has been writing since the 1960s. It offers a marvellous opportunity to see plays that are all too rarely performed on English stages, an opportunity made more vital by the fact that the first two plays, Olly's Prison and The Pope's Wedding, have been produced to the very highest standards.

These two plays share some important similarities (both, for example, deal with working class lives contemporary to their composition) as well as showing that Bond can write in very different registers. The Pope's Wedding, Bond's first professionally produced play (1962) is a brooding, minutely detailed and ostensibly naturalistic account of the doomed relationship between a young rural worker, Scopey, and an old outcast, Allen, who live in the same Essex town; it's affect on me was to sadden, producing an air of contemplative melancholia. Olly's Prison, originally a TV play (1992), tells an epic story of a man, Mike, who commits an appalling crime and then spends the next decade or so, in prison and out, coming to terms with what he has done; it's affect on me was both anxiety-inducing, adrenalin-producing and I emerged rather awe-struck and inspired by its reach. What the two plays in performance here have most strongly in common is that they take the audience into the heart of mysteries which are not solved within the play (Bond is never a glib writer) but that they have a solution feels important for myself as viewer, a feeling which has stayed with me long since seeing the plays. A number of (excellent) books have been written about the meaning of Bond's drama but I am not sure that its ability to affect the audience has been sufficiently emphasised. Bond's dramas, I would suggest, are not primarily a series of meaningful, enacted images to be "read" (although you can approach it like that) but rather living theatre experiences (Theatre Events, he calls them) to be involved in; processes undergone rather than processions gazed upon.

The Pope's Wedding is a measured play pace-wise, although never boring. It is also a structurally fragmented piece, being for most of the first half an immersion into the world of a group of working class lads (and a couple of lasses), casual labourers in rural Essex who spend their time moaning about being broke, getting drunk and smoking when they are not, engaging in mild yobbishness and play-acting antagonisms. Occasionally, punctuating the lads' scenes peripheral to this group, we get to meet, an old man, Allen, who lives alone in a ramshackle hut and whose only connection to the "main" story is that one of the girls who hangs out with the gang, Pat, does cleaning for him due to a promise made to her dead mother.

The main story focuses, after some time, on the individuation of one of the gang members, Scopey, who becomes a local sports-hero and wins Pat's hand in marriage. Throughout this first half, an audience could feel somewhat starved of a strong plot-line, although the antics of the lads are engaging enough and Allen offers the promise of mystery and development; we know the two "strands" must come together and both desire it (we want "something" to happen) and fear it (the lads might hurt Allen). This desire of the audience is answered in the second act but in a roundabout way. Scopey's relationship with Pat almost immediately collapses into domestic bickering; Scopey gradually takes over Pat's role of cleaner and cook to Allen and the old seems to fascinate the younger. The air of mystery about the old man is palpable – is he really Pat's father? what is the "work" he is doing with his piles of old newspapers? what does his part experience have to teach the younger man? Scopey pursues, in such a single-minded and dogged fashion that it becomes a monomania, the answers to these questions only to find out something terrible – the old man holds no secrets or knowledge at all, he's "just" a batty old man. By this point, Scopey has ruined his marriage and his position in his peer group, so he takes the only route which he now feels is available to him – he murders the old man and takes his place in the hut…

The sense of Scopey's disappointment is heartbreaking in performance. The audience has seen and, importantly, shared his frustration as part of a world which is going nowhere (that sense of the story not developing in Act One is a dramatic strategy) and ache for his relationship with the old man to be meaningful and enlightening. But it can't be – the old man is too far gone and Scopey hasn't the social skills to bring him back again. The sense of waste becomes palpable – you could say that the play conjures it up – and the final transformation of Scopey into Allen (a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid) is designed to leave the viewer with a palpable sense of frustration and sadness. What the play means is less important than that it does this, creates this feeling of dissatisfaction.  It opens a void which the audience member then has to fill. This all suggests to me that the play-event we are dealing with here is a kind of ceremony – the impossible ceremony of the title, The Pope's Wedding.

The Pope's Wedding is a social event to which we are invited in order to witness no one affirming a commitment to another, perhaps the impossibility of such a commitment; Olly's Prison is another kind of social ritual, a prison visit during which one watches the inmates realise that when they get out, they'll still be incarcerated. This has its own knock-on effect to the audience, as the implication is that we don't leave this play when we leave the theatre, the last line being

"Olly's prison. 'E'll never get out. We're all in it till we understand."

This kind of metatheatricality is apparent in the opening scene. The audience sits in silence whilst we watch the protagonist, Mike, trying to get some words out of a character (his daughter, Sheila) on stage who sits there in silence. The scene is long and testing but by the end of it, the play grips, which mirrors the protagonist's gripping hands on his daughter's throat. He murders her and both he and we spend the rest of the play trying to understand why this happened, what the implications are, what is going on after. Mike is sent to prison for a decade and spends a number of years in despair, before another horrific act propels him into attempting consciousness: a young prisoner hangs himself days before his release. By the end of the play, Mike has grasped that release from an actual prison is not an actual release from imprisonment, to which I'd add that coming out of a piece of theatre isn't actually emerging from the theatre; the play goes on all around us and we remain in it.

Near the end of Olly's Prison, a policeman named Frank, the former boyfriend of Mike's daughter, violently beats up the title character in order to frame Mike for the crime. It is worth emphasising that Frank does not do this because he is himself bad or corrupt; he does it because he is personally convinced that Mike is bad and corrupt. Here we see how a human being, one invested with social authority, can justify using violence against the innocent in order to protect the innocent. But Frank, ready to condemn another man, is not willing to face himself. Earlier in the play, when Frank comes in and sees that Mike has murdered Sheila, he's begins the process of telephoning the authorities when Mike offers him the flat. Frank stops dialling, takes Mike up on his offer and so does well, property-wise, out of the crime. Frank has himself become authority in the final scene, unable to face his own reality and so blaming Mike for everything. This is what Mike, and perhaps the audience, comes to "understand" at the end of the play: criminals are no worse than each of us, we all partake of the same daily bread, and any personal attempt to put oneself "above" criminals as an embodiment of the law makes one worse than them, not better.

About a week after seeing the play, I was watching an afternoon chat show which featured the policeman, PC David Rathband, who was blinded by Raoul Moat. In an odd and convoluted exchange with the host, the blind policeman said it takes a great effort for a human being to remain "good" but that Raoul Moat had been "born evil." It is almost as if PC Rathband is embodying Olly's Prison in his own being. I know of few other living dramatists who can so make one see the world through the prism of the theatre events they create. Then again, it wasn't contemporary dramatists that came to mind when I was watching it: it was Shakespeare, it was the Greek tragedians.

There are four more Bond plays in the coming season, and I will try to write down some thoughts on each – they'll probably be as disorganised and partially formed as the ones above but its important that the season doesn't go by without record, given that so few of the mainstream critics (or, for that matter, non-mainstream reviewers or theatre bloggers) have got themselves down to & written about these first two plays in the season. I'll leave you with the words of a critic who has, Simon Thomas (of MusicOMH):

Anyone serious about English Theatre of the last half century should think twice about missing these and the remaining productions.

Veronika Voss and fascination

Veronika Voss is the last film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD trilogy, following The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. All of the films are set in West German in the 1950s and each features a central female protagonist at the centre of a nexus of economics, history, survival and desire. Yet Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate film before his death in 1982 feels somewhat different to the other two BRD films. The titular protagonist does not find and make herself during the economic miracle - as do Maria and Lola - but has already spent the best part of herself during the war years. Voss is based on the last years of UFA star Sybille Schmitz, a hugely popular actress and favourite of Goebbels whose career never recovered once WW2 was over; she committed suicide in 1955. Using her life as a springboard, Fassbinder creates a glorious black and white noir in which a soccer journalist is drawn into a web by a faded actress, a web which leads to death and despair; it bears some similarities to Sunset Boulevard in the same way that Braun does Mildred Pierce or Lola does The Blue Angel.

The received wisdom about Fassbinder's BRD trilogy is that they are in some ways allegorical portraits of the West German economic miracle (Thomas Elsaesser deals with this critically in his excellent book Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject). Voss feels different because, although it is grounded in a particular time and its lead character has been shaped by a particular historical period, the subject matter of the film leaps beyond history into something more dazzling and dangerous. Veronika Voss is a film about desire and fascination, subject matter which is far more compelling (to my current eyes) than allegorizing history for socio-critical purposes. Voss seems like the last station for Fassbinder before his extraordinary final film Querelle, whereby he jettisons Germany history and all pretence at social realism to give a deeper, wider-ranging vision into fascination, disavowal and the forming of the socially gendered self (see Steven Shaviro's chapter on Querelle in his The Cinematic Body).

The journalist in Veronika Voss becomes fascinated by VV after meeting her after a screening of one of her Nazi era films. He becomes embroiled in her life as she tries to make a comeback, tries to deal with the past and maintains her present morphine addiction. The journalist's girlfriend also gets involved with Voss, leading directly to the girlfriend's death. This fascination of the couple with Voss can be taken as an emblem of audience fascination with stars and celebrities. Whether it is Voss on the silver screen, Voss as public celebrity or Voss as lost cause, at all times the woman is completely compelling and the couple are driven, we and they are  never sure why, to involve themselves with her. From whence does Voss's fascination derive? Fassbinder answers this question partially in the film's mise-en-scene, where she is made available to us through a highly stylized use of black and white cinematography – a film star's appeal is provoked in us partially by their manufactured cinematic presence. Yet this only goes some way to explaining why a star becomes fascinating and continues to be fascinating even when they are no longer doing the things which made them a star. There seems to be a deep need within the central couple, it almost might be deemed a void, which Voss feeds and fills. Yet even as I type this, I am advised by a voice to clarify – Veronika Voss does not criticise the fascination that its protagonist holds; it wallows in it. To merely criticise would be a puritan's pose; Fassbinder was better than a puritan. There is a scene, near the end, where Voss stands at a piano and sings Memories Are Made of This; other characters watch her as the audience do, fascinated even as the performance falters, each experiencing it in a peculiar, personal way. Rosel Zech brings a quality of watchability to this moment which is extraordinary, convincingly conveying that this person is the only person who can perform the song in this way, that we are experiencing the presence of a daring singularity. The idea that an individual can be a singularity, perfectly unlike anything else, is dangerous to the Democratic ideal. This makes fascination a subject which an artist explores at his or her peril, especially in ages such as ours, in which art is supposed to have a socially valuable qualities. Fascination has little to no positive, progressive social value, yet it is difficult to imagine life being as intriguing without it.

Fascination is a quality we most associate with film, music and sports stars; politicians might also fascinate and this is where the subject causes most unease. Yet fascination is not solely the preserve of the (in)famous. How many people owe their relationships and their careers to the fascination they exert over others? Only this week, the Tory politician William Hague has been unable to quite explain why he gave one Christopher Myers a job as his Special Advisor; it could be that Myers fascinated him in the way that, for example, George Villiers the first Duke of Buckingham fascinated James I and his son, Charles I. There is not necessarily an active sexual component to fascination – having sex with the fascinator might be a part of the deal or not – but what is central is that fascination brings a kind of mystery into our lives, the kind of mystery the Saints felt when they pursued their God, even unto their annihilation. Fascination and annihilation go together, the one leading inexorably to the other – perhaps we are fascinated because we wish to lose ourselves, or because we believe that we are lost and wish to find ourselves; in either case, the fascinator is believed to be the one in which we can be lost or found.

To be a fascinating person is a lifelong occupation. Those who fascinate are as addicted to being fascinating  as those fascinated by them are addicted to the fascination. Fascinators often come to bad ends – Voss commits suicide, a death arranged by the morphine-dealing health "carers" who are picking over the last remnants of her wealth in the film; in the age of Kings, favourites like Gaveston, Hugh Despenser or Villiers were killed by political rivals. It is doubtful whether a fascinator can ever stop casting the spell of fascination; the best they can do is become a recluse, like Garbo. One might break the fascinator's spell on oneself, although my suspicion is that life would be then given a fine coating of grey (unless one found another fascinator).

Fassbinder's Veronika Voss is one of the few contemporary, "respectable" works which deal with fascination. It is a lucky coincidence that I watched it in the same week as I re-read Howard Barker's small book Death, the One and the Art of Theatre. Barker is one of the few contemporary theatre artist who takes fascination as a subject. Odd, given that fascination is all around us but then, fascination is, as I suggest, an invitation to death. I write this blog not as a definitive statement but rather as a declaration of interest in fascination as a field of meditation, as a subject area (I am researching the life of the above mentioned Villiers for a film script).  I inch forwards a case that we consider fascination…