Review The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
by Tony Harrison

Mind The Gaps
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

In a world where the collection of data has become inextricably linked with cultural dominance, Tony Harrison's 1988 funny yet ambiguous The Trackers Of Oxyrhnchus has a welome revival at the Finborough Theatre in a cut-down production directed by Jimmy Walters.

To our untutored classical ear, this verse play, written shortly before the end of the Cold War by Tony Harrison, cannily mixes the archaic and the contemporary, the allure of Tutankhamun-like archeological digs with the then in-the-news music and recording industry's exploitation of young musicians.

All within the framework of the lewd and bawdy satyric play with the potential for tragedy, an almost-lost theatrical form which accompanied the ritual tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece.

This strange but compelling piece is itself  divided into three fragments. An imperial 1907 archeological expedition with two dons seeking to export in crates their papyrus finds to an Oxford University collection.  A 5th century BC mythological age of Greek gods and cloven-hoofed phallicly well-endowed, part goat, part horse, part human, satyrs. And then current-day London, via National Service, the South Bank's 1951 Festival of Britain and the 1970s' National Theatre.

The two obsessed dons, Bernard Grenfell (Tom Purbeck) and Arthur Hunt (Richard Glaves) are supervising a phalanx of Egyptian workers uncovering ancient scraps on a rubbish heap.

Disappointingly for the intense Grenfell, legal petitions from disenfranchised citizens outnumber slivers of literature including a long-lost satyr play of Sophocles - every legible word matched by an equal number of illegible phrases and huge gaps in the papyrii.

Grenfell's mental state proves to be the gateway to a past mythological world where Apollo possesses the don's mind demanding the mortal puts together the lost play without any gaps where the meglomaniac Greek god is both main character and superstar actor.

Apollo also demands total control over the arts maintaining an artistic class system which excludes satyrs from creating or playing.

Nevertheless the call to excavate the long-lost play also acccompanies Apollo depending on the satyrs, lured by a reward of gold and freedom, to find his lost herd of cattle. Indeed, the herd only proves to be another gateway to the production and reproduction of music unlicensed by Apollo.

Harrison is a Leeds Grammar schoolboy who read classics, not at Oxbridge, but at his local redbrick university. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus takes a niche piece of historical and literary excavation, tracking its wider implications.

He takes as his starting point a reality - the expedition of Grenfell and Hunt using Grenfell's historically recorded real-life mental illness to lead us finally into a world where the past, the contemporary and the mythological uneasily co-exist together.

The leader of the satyrs (Richard Glaves transformed from Hunt) brings the audience through a Good Old Days Leeds Variety type singalong. Except the audience is instructed in a smattering of Greek to sing along to as a charm to raise the  boozy, lusty satyrs. They burst out from the confines of the crated papyrii on which Sophocles wrote his satyr to erupt into a spirited proletarian clog dance choreographed by Amy Lawrence.

It's certainly a very male play, a hold broken only by the fragile yet self sufficient nymph Kyllene (Peta Cornish) bringing a statuesque female dignity, a Victorian view of nymphs, contrasting with the rumbustious satyrs as they seek Apollo's lost animals.

Mixing classical stanzas, what snobby bloggers (!!!) might call popular culture, a kind of Dr Seuss frivolously serious didacticism, the dramatic conflicts over translation and artistic creation widen and darkens into the failure of idealism, increasing suppression and censorship.

Walters' energetic direction safeguards the lively pace and comedy but also clearly delineates a grevious uncertain, repressive status quo.

Designer Phil Lindley's tattered papyrii hangings, stone slabs and one dimensional pillars ingeniously evoke the Egyptian excavation and transform into a mythological backdrop before the archeological layers are completed by projections of modern London on the backcloths.

The costumes by Alexander William Connatty are equally unfussy and effective. Last, but not least, the lighting of Tara Marricdale takes on a central communal status and tellingly obscures as the ideal retreats into more violent consequences. 

And somehow Harrison's fidelity to multiple sources, the orginal history and texts, yoked together with a fluent train of thought rather than cut and paste as they emerge into the modern world,  insures a resonance in our current digital environment. Director Walters has only to make the lightest of updates - mobile phones, capable of filming violent acts, and isolating earphones instead of boomboxes - to keep the play pertinent.

For  we live in an age where artistic creation is now subsumed into and consumed as "content". The most popular, easy-to-reach websites often dominate with one sole interpretation of events and  control of such data, whether collected by companies or the state, raises the possibility of abusive monopoly commercial exploitation.

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus still feels seriously relevant. Even the unwieldy title seems to anticipate our cookie-tracked digital age and it's a green light for this intriguing, humorous yet troubling play. 

Review Magnificence

Magnificence
by Howard Brenton

The State We're In
http://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Which play links squatters, bailiffs, Che Guevara t-shirts, Cambridge University, constables, Brixton Prison, situationism, bonkbuster novel The Carpetbaggers, graffitti, public lavatories the welfare state, Edward Heath's Tory government, a revolutionary banner with a tendency to sag, John Marston's Jacobean satire The Malcontent, baked beans, the clap, the High Court, Winston Churchill ...

(Takes a breath!) ... The church,  investigative current affairs programme World In Action, Chairman Mao, the BBC, calor gas lamps, dustbin men, Hollywood stars Caroll Baker and Steve McQueen, cornflakes, Marmite, Mickey Mouse, the Paymaster General, French writer Jean Genet, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, the Apollo Moon Landing, the Stars and Stripes, the Hammer and Sickle, Benny Hill, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, China, champagne, The House of Lords, the biblical Song of Songs and a London Times obituary?

You may have guessed by the title of this review, it's Howard Brenton's 1973 Royal Court Theatre play Magnificence. This uneven, but complex and fierce play is very much rooted in the student politics, arguments, idealism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Finborough Theatre production has certainly garnered an impressive cast of theatrical luminaries of that generation to help fund it -   Judi Dench, David Edgar, David Hare, Joanna Lumley, Tom Stoppard and Harriet Walter (in case you are the type who wants to complain, the programme/play script acknowlegments studiously avoid the use of Honours' List titles) among others.

A group of squatters during the housing shortage of the 1970s break into an empty derelict house (Phil Lindley's evocative and adaptable peeling-wallpaper set, equally a squat, a Cambridge college and an English garden).

They find themselves under siege from "murder in my heart" Slaughter the freelance bailiff (Chris Porter) acting for an unnamed landlord. An ex British mainland and colonial policeman, he's already been exposed in a TV documentary for a fatal misdemeanour, but is nevertheless backed by a philosophical constable (Tim Faulkner).

The squatters, whose first act is to spray slogans on the walls, are a motley crew, led by libertarian Jed (Joel Gillman) with his pregnant soft-hearted, homemaking girlfriend Mary (Daisy Hughes) in tow.

Plus the more easily swayed, apologetic Will (Will Bliss) with a Uriah Heep turn of phrase, "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am, to wreck Society", denim-clad Veronica (Eva-Jane Willis) on two weeks' holiday from the BBC and the more quietly-spoken and observant Cliff (Tyson Douglas). 

The constable allows the bailiff to raid the premises. In fact,  it is the clash between the new (the police constable's concern over the health and safety of a calor gas lamp) with the old (the bailiff's subsequent unregulated private sector violence) which leads directly to Mary losing her baby, Jed's imprisonment and a final path to destruction.

In between the action switches to the rarified environs of Cambridge's ivory tower and a meeting between  don Babs (Hayward B Morse) and his smooth talking grey tinted former tutee, lover and now a new breed of managerial MP Alice (Tim Faulkner again).  

Magnificence has a  rawness, political and literary inclusiveness which are both its strength and weakness. Indeed, Brenton was fresh from writing fringe plays when he was given space at the Royal Court with director Max Stafford-Clark.

The writer using part naturalism, a part Mr Punch stylized Jacobean satiric style grapples with a mosaic of competing issues of some complexity including the archaic leftovers of another age within a new, educated society.

Even the Chief Constable of the local force (force being the operative word) has a Cambridge degree and the Special Branch have tutored the constable in the ins and outs of factional politics and theories.

In 1973 Oxbridge was also still allowed the special privilege of their own top and bowler-hatted police forces (which Cambridge still retains) and a substantial property portfolio.  Simultaneously Lord Eccles held the purse strings as Her Majesty's Paymaster General and as Minister for the Arts.

The scene which has lasted the best remains the Cambridge scene, done full justice by Morse and Faulkner, with not only the recognizably Not The 1948 Show or  Pythonesque, intellectual playfulness but also ultimately a controlled fury. 

Yet the play feels torn inside itself. It has something in common with Seán O'Casey without the dramatic polish but some of the poetry.  Finding a dramatic structure for the avalanche of issues becomes problematic and the sudden reappearance, after a considerable absence, at the play's end of Cliff with a final response (harking back to the Royal Court's two scandalous playwrights - John Osborne and Granville Barker) only serves to emphasize the flaws.

Neverthess it still has currency in our twentieth first century. It's a neat irony this Finborough Theatre revival  coincides with the hoo ha over Bob Dylan's disruptive silence regarding the Nobel Prize for Literature - Alfred Nobel being the inventor of gelignite which, along with a stylized take on literature, features largely in the play.

Mind you, the current housing crisis and the re-emergence of stories about presidential hopeful Donald Trump's landlord past also make the invalid court eviction notice and harassment of tenants still relevant.

This tragi-comic piece is directed with clarity and pace by Josh Roche benefitting from Joe Price's lighting design signalling the deliberate changes in style.

The title Magnificence with its mixed root meaning of grandeur and pomposity feels accurate for this unwieldy, experimental, hit-and-miss play. At the same  time its jabs of sporadic ferocity still hit the spot.

It's an upper range amber light from your agent provocateur reviewer and her own four-wheeled agent of revolution. 

Review It Is Easy To Be Dead

It Is Easy To Be Dead
By Neil McPherson

An Unsentimental Education
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2016/it-is-easy-to-be-dead.php

Charles Hamilton Sorley was a name TLT and her motorised steed knew faintly from anthologies  and his poem Such, Such Is Death was familiar. But other than his name and that poem, he was an unknown quantity when we set off to the Finborough Theatre for a new biographical play on his life.

And it proved to be a gentle revelation in this solidly contructed piece directed by Max Key with Alexander Knox as Charlie whose life was cut short by a sniper's bullet at the age of twenty on a French battlefield in the autumn of 1915.

It Is Easy To Be Dead, the title is taken from a poem, is a clear dramatised introduction to his life and work which brings home all too keenly his enormous promise. He was a signficant posthuous influence on fellow Marlborough College pupil, Siegfried Sassoon after  Robert Graves had discovered Sorley poems and shown them to his friend.

However McPherson has chosen understandably not to define Sorley by  assocations with other First World War poets but to let him take centre stage alone as an original and intriguing voice.

Designed cleverly by Phil Lindley to accomodate the videos and war scenes, the setting is the study and parlour of his parents, William Ritchie Sorley (Tom Marshall) a professor of moral philosophy with ties to German academia, and Janet Colquhoun Sorley (Jenny Lee), a suffragette who determined that Charlie's memory should live on. 

Certainly his life is worth exploring. He comes through as a figure ready to straddle the transition between Victorian imperial philanthropism and twentieth century welfare state, curious, generous, with an unsentimental recognition of his privileged position and eager to accumulate experience across class and country divides.

Playwright McPherson makes the play's outer framework the reflections of Charlie's parents after his death interspersed with  projections (video designer Rob Mills), along with the music of  parlour female piano player (Elizabeth Rossiter) and singer (Hugh Benson), the latter almost like a Charles Sorley alter ego with a repertoire of the classical and the popular.

We follow the young man's journey from Marlborough School where he excelled in both sport and academic subjects to Oxford to the horrors of the French battlefields. In between came a lpre-war episode when he furthered his studies in Germany where he both admired the German way of life and noted the increasing militarism and anti-semitism amongst student fraternities.. 

We did recall that maybe this type of relationship with Germany and the German people was not so unusual. Even in the Second World War film Colonel Blimp, the Colonel also has a youthful trip to Germany and a life-long German friend.

While McPherson confines himself to Sorley's own words, imbuing the piece with accuracy and authenticity,  it also somewhat imprisons the playwright and prevents the wider context.

When Sorley mentions his ambition, for example, to undertake social work or become a working men's college instructor, we wondered whether he was influenced at Oxford by the work of Toynbee Hall which would brought him into contact with London's East End.

Similarly we wondered how his viewpoint as a Scotsman coloured his and his father's obvious affliation with German culture and its social insurance system, with which Britain was only just catching up.

The influence of his strong minded parents, the element of school rivalry in the promotion of the poets who emerged during the First World War, Charlie's place as a Scots poet are all loose threads which, we felt, the playwright might have taken up and woven together.

The structure seems straightforward, although we detected a possibly more complex relationship in the play with the authors Sorley encountered on the page during his all-to-short life. Nevertheless Sorley's fresh individual voice comes through loud and clear.

This is a play with all the groundwork done, so an amber light for a dramatised life which made us want to know more.. Given further development, It Is Easy To Be Dead has the potential to deepen our understanding of a turning point in European history and has already made a distinctive contribution to giving Charles Hamilton Sorley his rightful place amidst better-known contemporaries.

Review Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

I Wish To Die Singing - Voices From The Armenian Genocide

by Neil McPherson 

Breaking The Eggs

http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

The slaughter of up to one and a half million Armenians in Easter 1915 within the rapidly-diminishing  Ottoman Empire hit the headlines at the time worldwide. One hundred years later Neil McPherson’s purposeful and necessarily partisan documentary drama piece, I Wish To Die Singing, charts the arrests; torture; mass killings; looting; rapes; slavery; forced conversions; death marches; desert concentration camps and an uncertain world response which remains to this day. 

Narrator (Jilly Bond) introduces an intense 90-minutes without interval, the spine of which are the lives of three different Armenians, survivors, part of an ancient Christian trading merchant minority in a Muslim country.

Music and dance accompany as a girl on the cusp of womanhood  (Tamar Karabetyan) steps forward to speak of relatives in America, along with  the painted Easter egg customs: “Whoever breaks the other person’s eggs wins”.

The joyful little girl (Siu-see Hung) from a wealthy merchant family revels in her dress from Paris and the country boy (Bevan Celestine) expects one day to inherit the family farm. 

Directed by Tommo Fowler, the seven-strong ethnically-mixed, colour blind cast, also including Simon Yadoo and Kate Binchy, give the stories a universal appeal, reinforced by sparsely-scattered references to other historical slaughters. 

The actors play multiple roles feeding in information to the audience from designer Phil Lindley’s  plain rough-hewn gray stage.  Backdrop projections (lighting and video: Rob Mills) include the Anatolian hills, sentences in the Armenian language unravelling as the characters speak, graphics, quotes, the landscapes of tragedy,  as well as  photos of perpetrators and victims. 

Theatrically, the verbatim testimony of the victims are the strongest, most affecting part of the play. 

The old man who swears not to “colour” events  (an affecting performance by Tom Marshall) relates facts which have the power of searing poetry. A sudden wail of the wounded released into the air after their assailants leave at sunset. The rows of heads on one side, bodies on the other with the slits in the thighs into which the hands were neatly inserted “like pockets”. 

Noone denies killings took place, but the Turkish Government have always maintained they were part of a civil war and not a systematic destruction of the Armenian people (with the Assyrian Christians and Greeks also targeted).

As the world map and alliances shift yet again, this play positions itself as part of a centenary push to have the slaughter put into the legal category of genocide, a word created specifically referring to the mass killings of Armenians. Reminding TLT and her companion of a sentence in  Ulysses by James Joyce (a book directly linked with Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire): “I fear those big words ... which make us so unhappy”. 

The word genocide was coined at a particular juncture in history during World War II with its alliances and emnities. Many present-day countries did not even exist.  The play’s narrative strand gives a partial rundown of why most scholars accept the events as genocide. However, as a subject of international law,  politically and nationally, it remains a divided issue.

I Wish To Die Singing tackles a 100 year old issue still very much the currency of our global times. A TLT amber light.