Review The Pulverised

The Pulverised
by Alexandra Badea
Translated by Lucy Phelps

The Opposite Of Babel
 http://http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

In the Bible, Babel is the site where all speak a common global language but the universal language is destroyed by the builders of the Tower Of Babel. Now it seems that it's financial jargon and the global corporate chase for the bottom line to maintain solvency at any cost which has become the global language.

The memory of the Icelandic financial crisis when the country's major banks collapsed came to mind when Reykjavik was mentioned late in the one act economic drama The Pulverised, translated from the French.  For the set is dominated by what could be the ashes of a fire or maybe s solidified volcanic lava flow. 

Writer Alexandra Badea is Romanian-born but lives in Paris. The Pulverised therefore looks at a world of outsourcing from a Franco-Romanian perspective.

A call centre worker (Solomon Israel) is in the former French colony of Senegal where employees work, like call centres all over the world, to standard scripts. A young country girl ((Rebecca Boey) is an electronics' assembly worker in the Chinese city of Shanghai, a part of which France once controlled.

Globe-trotting quality assurance  executive (Richard Corgan) is based in Lyon with his family, capital of the recently-formed French administrative region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. However he is more often found in a hotel room and branch offices around the world as he carries out his job.

Meanwhile in Bucharest, another centre for French outsourcing,  a new mum (Kate Miles), a research and development engineer, perfects her language skills for the unnamed French multinational and a chance of the one new job while the company cuts the old ones.
  
The drama emphasizes the repetitive, dislocated, unnatural rhythm of work from the factory floor to the executive level with the underlying crudeness, savagery and humiliation which a screen-based relationship with the world brings.

Paid-for live porn on screen is customized and broadcast in time-efficient slots. The lower rungs of the manufacturing hierarchy allow  for abuse. Even religion has learnt to package itself for the MP3 age with advertisments on African buses. The African call centre clerks must adopt typically French names to answer customer calls.  

The Pulverised is divided into a series of monologues. The production, directed by Andy Sava and designed by Nicolai Hart-Hansen, flashes projections in between (audio visual and sound designer Ashley Ogden), has the four-strong cast doing automaton or zombie like moves (movement director Lanre Malaolu), as well having an electronic music soundscape.

Unfortunately, despite good performances, The Pulverised suffers from a lack of context.

This is not to downplay the issues involved and the strongest and most disturbing moment for us was a viaual one (beautifully played by Solomon Israel) when it dawns on a a call centre worker that promotion is coming to him as a result of an avoidable tragedy involving, at best, covered-up criminal negligence by his company.

However The Pulverized also seems to be either strangely worded or in  a strange translation. We're told that the Shanghai worker is manufacturing "boxes". Yet at another point in the play electronic circuits are mentioned.

In fact we think this play may need amplifying in English for a UK audience. Otherwise it feels like we've seen it all before - whether in the Hollywood version like Up In The Air,  the plays, for example, of Anders Lustgarten or the "selling" of a pen in the Wolf Of Wall Street.

Ironically in a  week when the French and English languages have become a hot issue, our hunch is The Pulverized may have lost something in translation elminating a dramatic discussion of what the French language means in the modern world and becoming a more standard script. 

While Shanghai has an obvious meaning for us all, we felt the names of Dakar and Bucharest simply do not have the same resonance and history for an UK as for a Francophone audience.

So the moment when suddenly we're dragged from the countries which remain in France's orbit to Reykjavik where there can be a glimmer of recognition simply does not have the impact it should have had  and we award an amber light.  

Review The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie

The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie

By Anders Lustgarten 

China's Got Talent

http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

A trip to Dalston's Arcola Theatre to be whisked away to China - at least, the China inhabiting playwright and activist Anders Lustgarten's mind in The Sugar-Coated Bullets of The Bourgeoisie  directed by Steven Atkinson in this new play. 

The title is taken from a 1949 Mao Tse Tung quote warning revolutionaries to guard against "sugar-coated bullets". Although before learning that, TLT and her film buff jalopy did wonder whether it was an echo of Luis Bunuel's French film The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie - yes, we're at it again, seeing French in everything this season!

We follow the fortunes of Chinese hamlet, Rotten Peach, from 1949 to the present day on the multi-layered set designed by Lily Arnold.

A gray stone-fronted, turretted lavish home of the local potentate landlord also opens up to become a military office, a balcony for Chairman Mao and a police cell. Meanwhile on either side  of the stage, smaller sets double up as a ancestral shrine, a factory floor and a fast food outlet in modern China. 

Against this impressive, if squeezed in, backdrop, a cast of eight, some of whom triple and quadruple up, are peasants, the silk-clad landlord, policemen, factory girls, gamers and a hall-of-mirrors cluster of Chairmen Mao (the original played by Siu Hun Li).

From the beginning, we root especially for the mud-brown downtrodden peasant women -  prostitute Lotus Blossom (Anna Leong Brophy), Horseface (Rebecca Boey), daughter of an unfeeling Gao (Sara Houghton) branded by a birthmark with a clubfoot (maybe an oblique reference to foot binding)  and the downtrodden slave-wife  (Alice Hewkin) of peasant Jiao (Stephen Hoo).

And relish the brief reversal and achievement of new rights  when the People's Army in the shape of Xu (Andrew Leung) and Tang (Louise Mai Newberry) sweep into the village.  

While the agitprop influence on a political playwright like Lustgarten (who has both visited China and has a PhD in Chinese studies) is doubtless Bertolt Brecht, TLT's own little movie fan of a  People's Car told her how it called to mind  the 1937 Hollywood movie, "The Good Earth".

Not least because the play sometimes draws together situations in China and Britain, just as the film draws together China and dustbowl America.

This looking at China though a Western filter is implicitly (if slightly disingenously) acknowledged in Lustgarten's introduction to the published play.

We have always found Lustgarten's plays provocatively interesting if flawed, and this felt to us as much an excursion through different Western generations' perceptions of China, as they seek to influence and interfere, as a brisk canter through Chinese history.

While it holds the attention, it's unfortunate that, keeping up with the news, a sudden introduction of an LGBT storyline is almost the final impression left (no pun intended) of the play. Its clumsiness, artistically speaking, almost overwhelming a far cleverer and more insightful finale, a modern perversion of an "I'm Spartacus" moment,  encompassing regional competition and mass production. 

But the basic bones of a fascinating play are there, with an admirably clear summary of one history of a vast country with its global implications.

In an era when many a new work struggles to fill a large stage, it's a rare occasion when TLT wonders if a slightly revamped The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie on a larger stage with a larger cast would solve some of the problems of pacing. And bring a new dimension to an epic struggle and ambitious play. An amber light.