Three Kingdoms: Simon Stephens and Sebastian Nübling

Three Kingdoms at the Lyric Hammersmith

Not considered suitable for under 16s or British mainstream theatre critics

I found Three Kingdoms a bit of a joyride. Sit forward on your seat in the first half, enjoy the laughs, then have a drink in the interval and just go with the second half. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to add to what is already out there in blogs, so I’m mostly going to quote them here in case it makes one more person see the work. There are only three nights left. Get a ticket!

On the work:

On the way this work makes you feel, the reactions it provokes, I identify with this: Matt Trueman, Carousel of Fantasies:

About halfway through the first half of Three Kingdoms on Tuesday night, probably an hour and fifteen minutes in or so, I scrawled the following in my notebook:

“Stop everything. Storm the National Theatre. Tear down the Donmar Warehouse. Torch the Royal Court. Redact the entire history of the RSC and fetch me Trevor Nunn’s head on a plate.”

In retrospect, this was probably an over-reaction born in the heat of the moment. Not because it over-praises, but because it does the great work at those theatres a disservice. Let’s blame the adrenaline flooding my bloodstream. Let’s blame the breathlessness and the dizziness; the disbelief and the sheer fucking thrill. I was putty. I was windswept. I was in love. (Matt Trueman)

On the coming together of theatrical cultures. The collaboration between the writing and the direction, the way the staging adds meaning, depth, humour and detail to the writing:

Dan Rebellato, playwright, Spilled Ink:

First, the play was written for Sebastian Nübling. Simon Stephens has been developing a writing style that leaves space for the director. The published text is large, generous, sprawling; it asks to be intervened in, to be selected from, to be cut. It reminds me of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible, a play that would probably take 12 hours to perform and has never been performed in its entirety. But even in more conventional theatre, J B Priestley always deliberately overwrote his plays, on the understanding that a particular production would find its own path through the material, its own emphasis, its own interests and could therefore cut it accordingly. Hamlet is enormously long in its fullest textual variant and is almost always cut, without demur.

Second, and following from the previous thought, if Simon’s intention is to offer a text to be cut about, interpreted, selected from and collaborated with, Nübling has been doing to good old-fashioned British thing of respecting the playwright’s intentions.

Third, the production’s imagery is entirely drawn from the text….(Dan Rebellato)

I am extremely interested in this approach to writing that leaves room for collaboration, writing with space for the director. I think it might be the key to bringing theatre and playwriting into a new era.

On the problem of the representation of women….

Three Kingdoms

…I wonder if the reviewers, and viewers who dismiss the work on the grounds that it titillates and doesn’t question degradation of women  are actually trying to find a way of criticising the work that avoids mentioning what really made them uncomfortable – the orgy scene, the naked men…You can buy dildos, strap ons and lubrication on the high street (I think).  A 60yr old man can pick up a 20yr old girl in a London club. And that’s even before getting into the underground scene. But we can’t see it on a stage in our country? Are we so distanced from these things? Perhaps that’s one of the points. The girl trafficked in Estonia is the older British man’s young wife.

But interwoven with this criticism is the only reservation I have about the work –  the lack of strong female characters…. to make theatre richer, to add poetry, to add power, to play against the male voices, to talk back. The muting of the female voice inside the deer mask was perhaps louder than if she were to suddenly speak, perhaps…. Or perhaps, within this non-naturalistic, non-realistic world, there is room for the other voice. But I didn’t find any female nudity gratuitous or any of those scenes titillating, there was little actual showing of female abuse, it was under the surface, perhaps that’s what made it more disturbing.

Chris Goode comenting on this subject on Andrew Haydon’s blog:

I think you’re right that a major problem is that there are too few women in the company and their roles are feebly underdeveloped; the requirements of the production are anyway not easily distinguished from the requirements of the men in the play who (bountifully) hate women. So in the end I guess my problem is that I have nothing left to work with, in extending to Stephens and Nübling some benefit of the doubt, other than whatever degree of cultural proximity permits me to assume that they are not themselves amused and titillated by the emotional and physical abuse of women by men. There is a problem with such assumptions, which is that they are wrong about a lot of people. What ultimately I find ticklish, to say the least, is this: if Three Kingdoms had been made by out-and-out misogynists, in what ways would it look or feel any different? (Chris Goode)

You know, I’m not sure if I can formulate it yet, but I think the work would look and feel very different if it had been made by misogynists. There was something about the porno scenes that were just… playful, irreverent, just a little bit real too. A little like Lars von Trier’s film The Idiots.  But still, the main contribution to the work made by the women was their sparkly dresses doubling up as stage lights. All I can say is that as a woman I didn’t feel at all uncomfortable, the women on stage, while they had weak roles and little voice, they did have intelligent glints in their eyes, they did seem in control of their physicality.  In contrast, I felt very uncomfortable and angry at the way Simon McBurney had his actor playing Margarita running naked, vacant, drunk in emotional ecstasy within a sea of clothed men for an extended section of Complicite’s The Master and the Margarita. That was far more disturbing, and yet Billington described it like this: ‘Sinéad Matthews’s Margarita, bravely naked for much of the second half, also conveys the inherent goodness of the devoted muse’

To reduce this work to its story is to reduce this work – and too often that is what reviews do. Andrew Haydon on meaning and making sense:

When a play takes this sort of jump outside the realms of the possible, it suddenly seems to become much more difficult to talk about. “What does that mean?” suggests itself as a question. Or even simply “What just happened there?” Are we meant to reconstruct our ideas of what happened through this new development? Is this sudden transformation intended as A Big Metaphor that we’re meant to Get? It is disorienting in all these ways. Being willing to allow that disorientation to be a part of the whole experience of the play feels crucial.

I suspect, in part, this might be what other critics have objected to: the fact that, on one level, the play does stop “making sense” altogether – although I would argue that this precise moment actually generates a lot new *senses*. But it’s not immediately pin-downable. And if someone believed their job was to pin down and explain, then this sort of thing is inevitably going to get on their wick.

I think what is most impacting about the work is to do with form, theatrical languages, and ways of making theatre: The colliding and collaboration of three different theatre making cultures, the British naturalism, ‘text-based’ writing and meaty acting, the German approach to directing work, Sebastian Nubling’s direction that pushes Stephen’s writing, plays against it, riffs with it, adds layers to it, the detail and precision in the direction, the craft, the physicality of the Estonian actors, the irreverence towards nudity, sex, pornography. The detail in the delivery of text, the range of acting styles and actors was fantastic, the character Steffen Dresner towering above the others, and the use of different languages on stage, the play with translation, the pop culture references and the humour was exhilarating. It was such a rich experience, the kind of theatre experience that doesn’t require intellectualisation, that it is hard to remember or describe some of the most fantastic moments. But I remember at one point, out of this crazy physicality, out of the chaos, emerged poetry. Not in the sense of poetic visual imagery (there was lots of that too), but literally… spoken, meaningful poetry…words that suddenly got to the heart.

I went to the theatre most nights while I was in Berlin for a few months, and I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years so I saw a lot there – most of it nowhere near this level of craft, direction and writing. But still, I haven’t seen enough work outside of this country to know whether writing, performance and direction this strong and entertaining has come together before. My sense is that while the elements within this work have been around in the theatre for years, because of its collision of different theatre making and writing cultures, the work truly is ground-breaking.

‘I’ve never thought of myself as avant-garde. If you run around a race-track and are a full circuit behind everyone else, then you are alone and appear to be first. Maybe that is what happened to me…’ Tatsumi Hijikata

It got me thinking about Butoh, a post-war Japanese avant-garde movement. - the character of the ‘Trickster’ particularly reminded me of images like these:

Michio Ito, Dancer, 1916

Tatsumi Hijikata (1950s)

Tatsumi Hijikata

Risto Kübar, who played the ‘Trickster’ is an astonishing actor  who can go from the performance of failure seen in performers from Forced Entertainment as he struggles to sing, embarrassed as he realises he is being watched…to a strange all knowing mystical Shakesperian fool,  travelling between worlds, with the physicality, flexibility, technique and detail of a supreme dancer, morphing into a cross dressing prostitute (with little dress and pull up white socks), evocative of butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno… and finally, at the end of the evening, which, by the way, is not a second too long….he creates one of the most poetic moments I’ve ever seen.

The mainstream theatre critics have put audiences off seeing this work, that is a serious crime against theatre and they should all be hung. (out to dry, I mean, of course)

Product and Furniture designer Ana-Maria Pasescu Stewart has constructed a light source that isn’t so traditional.

Why critics shouldn’t be invited into the creative process (but writers should)

So I have been reading this: Andrew Haydon on ‘embedded criticism’

& this: What new dialogue can we set up between people who write about theatre and people who make it?

& I can see some problems with having critics/reviewers inside the process of making theatre…

The star system or a university marking procedure – which is worse? Hannah Silva & Chloe Langford performing at Dartington College of Arts, 2006

Artists wanting critics to come into rehearsals perhaps want to build a model closer to their experience of college/university.

When university lecturers in a drama department go into student rehearsals it is often because they are also assessing the process. This was true to the extreme at Dartington College of Arts, where I did my degree. There, a performance module was assessed 100% on process. In other universities, the process also impacts on the mark and feedback (like at Exeter uni, where I did an MFA and taught).

The main reason for this is that theatre education is focused on the artists, the makers and the making of the work itself, and not on the final product, or, in some cases, the audience. Performances that would bore a public audience often get high marks due to the working process, concept and research behind them; performances which would entertain and delight sometimes got lower marks due to lack of thought, little collaboration and poor research during the making. The work suddenly coming together on the night doesn’t make up for a weak process within these contexts.

However, outside of university, in my opinion, it is the final piece of work and the audiences that matter. The working process is necessary not for its intrinsic value, but to produce a good piece of work. Some celebrated companies have appalling working processes yet still produce phenomenal work. That’s not to condone treating actors like puppets, but still, I expect the theatre world would be very divided between those with closed rehearsal doors and those with open studios.

Another reason for taking process into account in university is that there’s only one chance to perform – things can go wrong on the night, and it might not be fair to judge the work based on a bad night/circumstances. We also have this problem with reviews. Having a press night means critics are all reviewing the same performance and if it wasn’t a great one then the review can be significantly impacted by this….as much as critics, audiences and anyone else might think they can take into account factors such as technical failures, small audiences, their own bad mood or a show in its early stages – they can’t. I don’t think the solution is to invite critics into rehearsals, but perhaps getting rid of designated press nights would help.

Hannah Silva in Opposition at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth 2011. Photo by Eileen Long

It is already near impossible for new companies and artists to persuade critics to come and review their work, particularly those of us making work regionally. It would be impossible to get them to view the process too. There’s a risk this would push regional and lesser-known practitioners even further to the margins, resulting in some work being even more disadvantaged than it already is.

If coming into the process has no impact on the review – then what’s the point? If, as Andrew Haydon suggests, it is  to remind critics that artists are human, and to avoid personal attacks, there must be an easier way!

Audience by Ontroerend Goed

I think critics should be able to get angry about a bit of work, (although the one star ratings in What’s on Stage’s reviews of Audience de-values the points made). Maybe that anger wouldn’t be there if the critic had drinks with the cast the previous week and knew how much they’d slogged. But the work is the work, it should speak for itself, and it should be able to provoke reactions in a way that day-to-day human encounters cannot. Anger is part of that – audiences often feel it.

Like Action Hero recently blogged, the best scenario is if a critic experiences the work as the audience member does. Which means sitting within the audience, not on the edges of the work, and maybe not taking notes during the show. Of course the ‘synopsis of what happens and then a short note at the end saying whether or not this story was pleasing to the critic’ as Sarah Kane criticised, is not much use.

Perhaps critics could have a blog dumping ground for their full review, before it is edited down to however many words they are allowed, so that those of us who want more depth can find it. Another interesting thing might be to re-visit reviews. To have one response directly after a show, and another some time later, when the impact of the work is more apparent. Although many shows are reviewed more than once by the same publication (lucky bastards) so maybe this happens already. And I think it’s more important to spend time reviewing regional and little known work.

Most performances are made for one viewing. Having seen a disastrous run through before seeing the final show lessens the impact of seeing the work live for the first time. Performers and ideas come alive in front of audiences. Some parts of the work need to remain beneath the surface.

I’m reading ‘The No Rules Handbook for Writers‘,  Lisa Goldman writes:

It was a senior reviewer who pointed out to me that most of his colleagues simply didn’t understand new writing. Some critics do write creatively themselves or are involved in the theatre-making process and this helps. Perhaps it would serve theatre to bring some critics together for a playwriting workshop.

Why inviting writers into the process is a great idea:

Inviting a writer into the rehearsal process and inviting them to write about it could be interesting. But in this case they are not reviewing the work and they are not critics. What they produce might be useful to the artists, students and audiences, what they write might be a piece of art in its own right. Their thinking and responses could be very useful to those making the work. I believe there are quite a lot of people already doing this – perhaps it just needs better dissemination, outside of academia.

I suppose artists are starting to consider different models for making work, and inviting different kinds of artists into the process to support it. Ten years ago, while I was living in Holland, I worked on a couple of pieces with this approach. The director invited an author (of a non-fiction book related to the show), a dramaturg, and me as a writer (I wrote the short story the piece was based on, the piece had no words in it) to join the group discussions with the others involved in the work (a choreographer, architect, composer, video designer). These conversations were not rushed, were not directly related to what was being made, took place mostly before the rehearsals and were given a lot of importance. I think this interest in inviting critics/writers into a process is perhaps British theatre finally carving out its own role for a dramaturg, whilst avoiding calling it that for as long as possible.

Nikolaus Fotiadis (first soloist of the Royal Swedish Ballet) and Anna Valev (principal dancer of the Royal Swedish Ballet) in Passion. Photo by Ranno: http://ranno.eu/about/

One of my most memorable moments in the theatre was seeing a Swedish ballet company from the back row of a large auditorium when I was seventeen. As I watched, I was writing in my head, a stream of ideas and understandings about who those dancers on stage were, interpretations of their movements, sudden understanding of the (intended or not) metaphors, the relationships between the dancers/characters, and therefore relationships between humans. It was the experience of ‘reading’ the performance that was so exciting. The text I wrote in response to it was entirely personal and in no way a review. However, it might have said something about the nature of watching dance, interpretation and how dramaturgy can happen in the mind of the spectator.

For me, that experience was not about discovering dance or the particular company/choreographer, but about a sudden ability to write in my head, and also about discovering the potential of performance to produce words, images and ideas for the audience. I guess for me, that moment of insight, inspiration, understanding  – is at the heart of making work, it’s the reason why I do it. And I want to feel that when I’m in the audience, I think that’s what theatre can do.

Having a writer around to respond to a creative process could produce some great writing. In this case I think the writer is not working for the company, not there to document the process in a systemised way, but part of the company, there as an artist in their own right, to explore writing around the process and the ideas, to collaborate.

The writer invited to write about the work from the inside is not a critic, and we will still need critics.