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NinjaMarmoset

~ rants & reflections of Martin Jameson, writer, director & grizzled media gunslinger.

NinjaMarmoset

Category Archives: Manchester Home

If You Don’t Like This Film You Are Officially a Bastard

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Martin Jameson in Film, Film Criticism, Free Speech, Ken Loach, Manchester Home, Writing

≈ 8 Comments

I have something to tell you.

(Shuffles nervously… looks at the floor)

The thing is…

How can I put this?

Oh for God’s sake, I’m just going to come out and say it!!!

“I am the NinjaMarmoset and I don’t like I, Daniel Blake.”

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I love Dave Johns. He did a gig at the Heatons Comedy Club and was bloody hilarious.

I actually declared this out loud in a social setting the other night and was greeted with looks of utter horror – jaws dropped, visibly, in front of me – as if I’d publicly stoved in the head of kitten with a paperweight fashioned into the shape of ex work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith.

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It’s not hard to imagine IDS as a paperweight, or even a snow globe. I’m sure I don’t need to post a picture of a kitten.

‘But these people have never been given a voice before!!’ one complainant wailed, eyes wide, starting to well with anger and distress. ‘And… I know lots of social workers – I’ve got social workers in my family!! – and it’s TRUE!’

As I started to explain where I was coming from, choosing to bypass the largely irrelevant detail that I’m actually married to a social worker, they stormed off in disgust. And the following day, they had wielded that most vicious of modern punishments… they blocked me from their Facebook page!!!! Not just unfriended me, mind, but blocked me altogether. Wow. They were REALLY angry. It’s a dagger through my heart, I tell you!!!

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Everything has added weight when translated into French

Yes, yes, I know, the film has won the Palme D’Or at the world’s most prestigious film festival; yes, I know it has received unanimous four and five star reviews, hailed as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ by The Guardian; and yes, I know the only people to publicly criticise it are bile filled right wing poverty deniers such as the objectionable Toby Young – or government ministers who haven’t actually seen the movie.

Sorry. I still really dislike it, and, uncharacteristically, I was intending to keep this to myself. After we came out of the movie, I quipped to my companion: ‘There’s no way I’m posting anything about it on Facebook – I’ll be lynched!’ 

But the mere fact I was even saying this – and that my flip comment came true (if you count being blocked from Facebook as the modern equivalent of lynching) – suggests that there are some bloody innards here that are worth a poke around amongst.

There’s a reason you don’t see anybody on social media left of, say, Ken Clarke, voicing criticism of this film because, basically, if you don’t like I, Daniel Blake then you are officially a bastard.

Or I’m the only (left of centre) person in the world who doesn’t like it. That’s possible, I suppose.

What the-Daniel-Blake is going on here?

Let’s start with the film itself:

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

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I’m not messing around!! Here be spoilers.

Daniel Blake’s a Geordie joiner who’s had a major heart attack. His doctors say he is too ill to work, but he is turned down for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and declared fit by the privately run Work Capability Assessment ‘decision maker’. The movie recounts Daniel’s attempts to get the ruling overturned, and his descent into abject poverty. Along the way he meets single mum Katie and her two children Dylan and Daisy. She’s had all sorts of terrible shit happen to her, and starves herself to feed her kids. She dreams of going to college, but ends up working as a prostitute. Daniel becomes a surrogate father and grandfather to her family, and she helps him when he finally gets his appeal for ESA. On the day of the hearing which intends to prove that he really does have a terrible heart condition…

…well if you can’t guess what happens in the toilets just before he’s about to speak then clearly you have never been to the cinema before.

I am fully aware that everything depicted in this film happens on a regular basis to people all round the country. The degrading Kafkaesque insanities of living in poverty and the benefits system are rehearsed many times every day, as they have been for decades.

They are part of my DNA.

One of my earliest memories is the bailiff coming to call when I was four years old. Apparently he told my stepmother (an out-of-work social worker, as it happens) that we didn’t have anything worth taking apart from the radiogram (here’s a link for younger readers)…

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Basically the iPod of the 1960s

…but as we didn’t have any electricity at the time, the loss of it wasn’t the greatest of tragedies. Trying to feed the family on a single bag of potatoes for a week was far more distressing for her. Later we had the gas disconnected, and our phone too. In those days there were no pay-as-you-go inclusive-minutes mobiles, such as are used by the characters in I, Daniel Blake. After narrowly avoiding eviction a few years after that, things did get a lot better, and apart from a year or two (on and off) on the dole in my early twenties (even in the rosy 1980s signing on could be a pretty grim experience) I have led a comfortable life.

But the visceral reality of having nothing – the fear of it – the shame of it – never leaves you.

So I should love I, Daniel Blake, right?

Well, no. I don’t go to the cinema to see things because they are ‘real’. Or because they are a statement of something that is ‘factually true’. That’s not drama. If I want facts, or an exposé, I can watch an episode of Dispatches or Panorama or read an article in The Guardian or The Canary (NB One of the outlets listed in that sentence is not actually somewhere that deals in factual journalism and was included for purely humorous purposes). I already know what’s going on, as did – I would posit – every liberally minded middle class film enthusiast in Screen 1 of Manchester’s Home, the independent cinema where I watched the film. Toby Young may not believe the plot of Daniel Blake, but I would be amazed if a single person came out of that screening saying; ‘We blow me down with a feather, I had no idea!’

A lot of the audience were in tears, so the visceral power of the film couldn’t be denied (except to me, for whom the visceral power of actually having nothing is still more potent). So what was my problem? Hard hearted bastard? Or is it a ‘writer’ thing? It’s my job and I’m applying professional standards to a work of political cinema whose qualities go beyond the normal tenets of dramatic film making…?

If I were doing a blind assessment of this script (as my work often demands of me), I would doubtless admire its intent but I would be pretty forthright about its technical failings.

The story is clunkingly linear and schematic – reliant on acres of spoon fed, off-screen, uncontested back story (clearly no one is interested in the concept of the unreliable narrator in this movie). Lovely, lovable people are brutalised by nasty jobsworths working for the state machine. The characters – good and bad – are two dimensional. They have no inner contradictions, no complexity. Both Daniel and Katie are flawless salt-of-the-earth types. Daniel is a martyr in the great Christian tradition – a saint in fact – more than a saint! He’s a carpenter (a bit like… hmmm… let me think); he can conjure useful things from nothing – bookcases, food, heat from flowerpots and bubblewrap…  (…but sadly not wine, as he’s teetotal); at one point he actually cures a small boy of ADHD (it’s like… its like… it’s like… a miracle!); he befriends a prostitute (see where I’m going with this?); and then dies for all our sins at the end (‘Tonight Matthew I shall be Jesus Christ Himself!’).

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I, Jesus Christ

A two dimensional cipher – and in Blake’s case, entirely passive. His only transgression throughout the movie is a little bit of illegal graffiti. When I was on the dole I found ‘ways’ to subsidise my income. Everybody did – and they still do. The fact that we had to is no less politically significant than what happens to the eponymous victim of Laverty’s screenplay.

Presumably this is the point – these are ‘blameless’ good people beaten to a pulp by the system. Even if you play by the rules you will be destroyed, because the rules are designed to destroy you. We are left feeling outraged, a little bit guilty… but ultimately virtuous, because we have shared Daniel’s pain.

But passivity is not dramatic. Watching a puppy being strangled for two hours might be grimly distressing, but without even a moment where the puppy turns to snap at its attacker, what we are witnessing is a ritual sacrifice… not a story, not a drama.

I’ve always been allergic to didacticism and polemicism – and I say that having contributed to quite a bit of it as a young actor, deviser, director etc in the 1980s. My hackles rise the second I sense I’m being ‘told’ what to think – and boy oh boy does IDB tell us what to think. It pins us back in our seats, puts its moralistic hand around our collective throats and leaves us no option whatsoever to think for ourselves… right to the final speech – the eulogy at Blake’s funeral – Loach and Laverty hammering us over the head with their message. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from this film, resistance is futile.

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How the Marmoset felt at the end of I, Daniel Blake

I find it manipulative – patronising – tedious – suffocating – a form of political dumbing down. And when voicing any kind of dissent becomes a pariah-inducing social gaffe, then it becomes a form of bullying.

Drama isn’t there to ‘tell us’ stuff. Drama exists to enlighten, to enrich our lives by using the contradictions and conflicts of character and story to illuminate the world around us. Not to show us facts – but to throw light from surprising angles on what reality actually means, in all its messy ambivalent glory. It’s the difference between something being ‘truthful’ and simply ‘true’. It’s about asking questions, not answering them.

Shakespeare wrote: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, and Hamlet remains a great play because it leaves the audience to wrestle with the answer – with the million imponderables it poses.

Of course, I’m comparing Apples and PCs here. Hamlet isn’t a polemic, and I, Daniel Blake unashamedly is. It’s in the great tradition of political, campaigning cinema (NB to my horrified Facebook blocker, should you ever read this, there have been hundreds of films giving voice to the lives of the dispossessed, you just haven’t seen them). And, fair enough, just because this particular marmoset goes all ninja about it, it doesn’t render the movie somehow invalid. That’s just a matter of taste, isn’t it?

Well, let’s explore the polemic – Daniel as martyr to the wilful destruction of the welfare state – as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ – who can argue with it? And if it ‘converts’ a single callous heart to the cause of compassionate welfare provision then surely that trumps all artistic criticism – just as Cathy Come Home was integral to the foundation of the charity, Shelter in the 1960s and Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough TV drama brought the crimes and injustice surrounding that disaster into the public consciousness in the 1990s.

Actually yes, probably, that is true, but I’m still fascinated as to exactly how IDB achieves its goal.

So… there I am, I’m watching the movie… but something is knocking at the back door of my political consciousness, and it’s really pissing me off. I ignore it, content that whilst the movie may not be to my taste, clearly it is an important event for a lot of people.

Then, hours later, in the middle of the night, I slip into my dressing gown, climb down the stairs of my inner contrarian and open the back door, and who should be on my back step, shivering in the rain, firmly dumped there by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty, but… Tiny Tim.

Yes! Seriously. It was him…

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Tiny Tim – 1960s activist, ukulele player and falsetto singer.

No!! Not him!! This guy!!

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Tiny Tim – blameless Dickensian poverty icon!

Sorry.

Yes! That’s what I don’t like about the polemicism of I, Daniel Blake – it’s dependant on a quasi Victorian – and arguably reactionary – notion of ‘the deserving poor’.

Who, reading this, doesn’t find their teeth set on edge when politicians start intoning about ‘doing their best for hard working families’? Why? Because of course everyone wants to help ‘hard working families’. It’s a meaningless thing to say. The test of a truly compassionate society is how we deal with ‘slightly indolent families’ – or ‘downright lazy families’ or ‘dangerous anti-social families’ who have gone completely off the rails.

What audience member could ever begrudge Daniel Blake his ESA benefit? He’s worked all his life. He’s paid his dues. He’s cared for his dying wife. He cures the sick. He deserves every penny. He’s the epitome of the deserving poor. But getting angry at Daniel’s injustice isn’t really what this country has to wrestle with right now. What if Daniel didn’t ‘deserve’ it?

Let’s imagine The Marmoset had written I, Daniel Blake (indulge me!).

Daniel’s a joiner – a competent, if mediocre joiner – who regularly knocks stuff off from his building site – and does cash-in-hand jobs on the side to avoid – no, evade – a bit of tax. He’s got an invalid wife and caring for her doesn’t come cheap. Like 49.3% of his fellow Newcastle citizens he votes for Brexit on June 23rd largely because he sees his mates priced out of jobs by cheap EU labour, and he’s particularly incensed when he learns that the Slovakian family in the flat next door are claiming benefits. Sitting in our lovely indy cinema drinking craft beer from plastic cups, he makes us uncomfortable, but we forgive him, because his wife is dying.

And then, bloody hell, she actually turns up her toes. Daniel’s grief-stricken – and he loses whatever meagre allowances were coming his way as his wife’s carer. He is hit by the bedroom tax. He has a heart attack. He can’t work, but is ruled capable and has to go through a lengthy and Kafkaesque process to appeal it. He is so angry and humiliated that he takes out his frustration on the Slovakian family who he knows are collecting benefits seemingly without hindrance.

Wow… now we’re feeling REALLY uncomfortable. This appeals process sure is cruel and dehumanising, but perhaps Daniel deserves it!

So my goal as a writer – wanting to interrogate the subject thoroughly and challenge my very intelligent audience – is to take Daniel on the most difficult journey I can throw at him. Everyone is angry when the ‘saintly’ Daniel Blake of Loach’s film is humiliated and dehumanised but I want to make the audience equally angry at the humiliation and dehumanisation of tax-dodging, Brexit voting, marginally racist Daniel Blake…

…because the core of a civilised welfare state is that benefits are provided according to need, not because we deem a fictional character morally worthy.

But if we are going to use fiction to throw light on a difficult subject, and if we are truly compassionate, then the humiliation of ‘bad’ Daniel must be no less wrong that that of ‘good’ Daniel… and to make the story narratively satisfying, Daniel can learn this too. He realises – just in time – that his anger at his neighbours is nothing to do with them, per se. They have been set at each other’s throats by the failings in the system, and by the inequalities in the macro-economics that drove them here in the first place. Daniel and his neighbours have more in common than they ever realised. If they understand this in time, the film is uplifting and feel-good. If Daniel realises this too late, then it’s grim social realism and we have to have another very expensive craft beer in the bar before we go home and watch something on Netflix.

The alternative – the one we see on screen now – is lazy. It’s lazy and simplistic, and it allows – encourages – the audience to be lazy and simplistic too.

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I’m about to make a highly ironic comment

Perhaps that’s why the film, as it stands, is more commercially successful than the marmoset’s version would ever be.

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The last sentence was layered with multiple ironies, just in case you didn’t notice

Well… perhaps that’s unfair.  As I said earlier, perhaps that’s the point.

Perhaps there’s a reason that Loach (who has directed a few nuanced masterpieces in his time – Kes being one of them) has opted for the melodrama of Victorian philanthropic guilt as his chosen dramatic form this time. Perhaps he and Laverty believe that the times are so Victorian, the audience must be spoken to as Victorians.

On the one hand, I hope that’s true, because at least it makes some kind of sense, and I can happily shut up moaning about it; on the other, I sense it isn’t, and a great film maker has fallen into a depressing and reductive trope which paralyses the debate by reducing the issue of welfare to simplistic, immutable and ultimately sentimental moral absolutes.

I, Tiny Tim and all that.

And on the subject of Tiny Tim, if you’ve never heard the guy – or if you remember him fondly… have a click on this.

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Home isn’t where the Inkheart is…

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Martin Jameson in European Theatre, Home Theatre Manchester, Inkheart Stage Play, Manchester Home, Manchester Theatre, Theatre, Theatre Design, Walter Meierjohann

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Ben Twist, Bryan Elsely, Walter Meierjohann

Back in June, anyone following this blog might have spotted that this particular marmoset wasn’t overly enthusiastic about Walter Meierjohann’s inaugural production – The Funfair – at Manchester’s newly opened flagship gallery, cinema, theatre complex, Home.

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Not that it looks like a Swedish interiors store or anything…

Six months on, how goes it at the Home that is in fact no one’s home?

Come on own up? What wazzock focus group came up with ‘Home’ as a name for a theatre? The one thing I don’t want a theatre to be! Come out, come out, wherever you are! I will find you and when I do I will subject you to slow and painful torture. Where was I? Oh yes… how is Home getting along?

Well. I attend the five screen cinema on a regular basis. The programming is superb and the projection and sound are flawless. The screenings are always well attended. Clearly a huge success and a major improvement on the old Cornerhouse screens. Tick.

The gallery isn’t my thing…

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Even an arthound like me found this exhibition uninviting. Can’t think why.

…but seems to be doing ok from what I can tell; there are usually people wandering around it. Query tick..?

As a Home member, I get £1.50 off cinema tickets and ten per cent off food in the restaurant which has a more than decent menu (yummy beef ragu if you like your shredded brisket). Tick and tick.

So what about the theatre itself?

Watching (the first half) of Inkheart, the building’s first Christmas show for children and young people, barely two thirds full (Christmas week) with an entirely unresponsive audience, was a truly depressing experience. From the bottom of my heart I do not want this still-new theatre to fail – it needs to succeed – I want it to be a place of theatrical excellence, adventure and entertainment. Not a Home – but a Palace of Delights!

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The Funfair had enigmatic clowns in it which I confess I am predisposed to dislike

My old boss at the BBC used to say that you should always be able to find five positive things to say about any production you see, no matter how much you dislike it.

I’m sorry, Chris, I just can’t – but I promise you, Dear Reader, that I did not go there to hate it. I always go to the theatre hoping to be thrilled and transported. ALWAYS. Otherwise what’s the point?

Children’s Drama is to Theatre what veterinary science is to human medicine. A vet can treat a human being, but a GP shouldn’t be let loose on a pet. The imperatives of children’s theatre will expose any director’s shortcomings – or illustrate that they have a vibrant, empathetic theatrical heart beating away under the pretensions that might stifle their adult work. Harness those skills for the most uncompromising of all audiences – kids – and that director will shine at everything they do. It is the ultimate theatrical litmus test.

So I’m scrabbling round for those five things, but like a marmoset picking tics off his mate after they’ve been de-flead, I’m not getting anything tasty.

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Entertainment marmoset style

As a preface to everything I say, I want to emphasise that I’m not blaming the cast. I don’t know any of them personally, and I have no reason to suppose that they aren’t all perfectly good actors in any other situation. But here, they looked entirely lost, and, at times, as if they had given up hope, delivering lines as if they were a random assembly of words… language devoid of all meaning. It was quite surreal at times. After twenty minutes I leaned across to my companion and whispered: ‘Have you any idea what’s going on?’

Like a low energy bulb, my friend James was unable to throw light onto the situation.

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Eco friendly but lacking powers of illumination

Only Rachel Atkins as ‘eccentric-woman-in-France-with-a-gun’ (I had absolutely no idea who the character was) seemed to be up for the fight, throwing her heart and soul behind every meaningless sentence.

First up, the script, from Cornelia Funke’s children’s novel, adapted by director Meierjohann and Stephen Sharkey, showed not the faintest inkling of the responsibilities and specialist skills a writer needs when producing work for young people.

Broadly speaking, it’s about a girl – Meggie – whose Dad can make books come alive just by reading them. (Seriously, books coming alive? Toys coming alive? Fairy tales coming alive? The lack of originality of the idea makes me feel physically tired.) He demonstrates this by reading a passage from Treasure Island after which gold doubloons fall from the sky. He then picks up The Arabian Nights… which concerned me as quite a lot of that is about men growing supersized genitalia.

So it’s about Meggie… Or is it about a Dad who can make books come alive who has a daughter who follows him around asking questions and standing watching for pages on end?

There’s a bald Richard O’Brian stylie villain called Capricorn who wants something or other which involves destroying books, or something… Then there are two ‘broker’s men‘ with cod Italian accents. Why? No idea. Perhaps it was in the spirit of internationalism. Anyway the idea seemed to be that the accents alone would be hysterically funny.

They weren’t. No one laughed.

Add into the mix a post apocalyptic punk called Dustfinger…  There’s always at least one post apocalyptic punk in Mr Meierjohann’s productions. And a Narrator who was mic’d for some reason and described things we could see for ourselves… oh yes and a comedy Arab/Indian (?) Aladdin type with another funny accent.

Note to Arts Council, Manchester Council and the Association of Greater Manchester Arts Authorities: Is it really acceptable in 2015 to have an all white cast (one actor looked like he might possibly be of dual heritage) and have the one character of colour played by a white actor doing a racial stereotype?

So back to Meggie and her Dad. Whose story is it? The script has no idea. Usually in children’s drama you put the child – or the child equivalent – in the driving seat, pushing the action. You don’t leave them as not much more than a passenger on a journey, the objective of which I defy anyone to describe coherently. As I say, it was something to do with books…?

Oh and while we’re at it, the whole ‘book’ schtick…

Ok, let’s assume we’re all agreed that books are a GOOD THING… but wait a sec. This is 2015. What do we mean by books? Do we mean the tangible physical things with pages? Or is it the words and the content and the ideas – after all, more and more people read from Kindles and computers these days. Are we saying that absorbing literature through other delivery systems is somehow lesser? And what about other ways of absorbing literature? Is drama ‘lesser’? Films? Television?

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It’s 2015, you can’t assume that the ‘book’ as an iconic object means the same thing it did fifteen years ago

There was an assumption in this show that the physical book was the significant thing rather than the content… or at least these ideas were completely confused in the script. The reality of modern technology, and the means of delivery wasn’t addressed (by the way, the characters had smart phones, so it wasn’t as if it was set in a pre-Kindle age). It would have been really interesting to find a way to dramatise this; to look at why the book itself has an inherent value. Without addressing this, the play was throwing around a wishy washy pick ‘n’ mix of ‘worthy’ ideas, and actually came across as a form of alienating cultural snobbery.

If this seems pernickety – and perhaps it is – it’s because the story was so weak, and spent so much time signposting its ‘values’ that this audience member was forced to examine whether those ideas actually hung together.

No single character seemed to be driving the action. It was impossible to understand clearly what was at stake, or for whom, nor what the quest was. There is a missing mother to find, but Meggie’s loss of her mother is never dramatised (certainly not in the first half). Meggie is an entirely static character. She loves books at the beginning. She still loves books at the interval (which was as far as I got).  I suspect she was affirmed of her love of books at the end too. Nothing at stake. No arc. An entirely flat, aimless narrative.

This lack of focus persisted in every scene. Stuff sort of ‘happened’ but you had no idea where to look on stage, nor what anybody’s objective was at any point. It was as if it had been written and directed by someone who had been told about a mysterious art form called ‘theatre’ but had never quite got the hang of what ‘theatre’ actually is. So there is a stage, actors and a set, and some lines to say, but they have been assembled like a Billy bookcase without the instructions.

These narrative techniques can be learnt. What I would like to see from Walter Meierjohann is that he has an awareness that he has some way to go with this.

I wonder if he sees theatre as a plastic art rather than a temporal one. It would certainly explain why his shows lack pace, shape or tension, and have the air of ‘presentations’ rather than stories.

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Drama is expressed in relation to the progression of time, not simply the presentation of images on a stage.

He’s been (anecdotally) reported in public forums stating that (new) writing isn’t a primary concern for him at Home, that he sees his brief as being more of a theatre maker (although how you do the latter without a passion for the former escapes me).

Nowhere does the failure to respect the power of the word (monumentally ironic in a story about the value of books) open its Nietzschean abyss more than in this production’s failure to demonstrate anything resembling a sense of humour. As with The Funfair, there were occasional ‘gag’ lines… (if you count a passing reference to Shaddap-You-Face by Joe Dolce as a gag) but every single one in that first hour failed to land. And the more the gags tanked, the more you felt the actors’ confidence draining before your eyes.

Each time another ‘gag’ approached, the actors’ delivery accelerated as if they wanted to skip over the oncoming tumbleweed as quickly as possible… not helped by the cod Italian broker’s men. Apart from the fact that I couldn’t really work out who they were supposed to be, the accents meant that what lines they had were hard to understand and the gags such as they were got lost amidst the garbled vowels.

Why? WHY????? Why were they comedy Italians?

Breathe.

Let’s talk about the set.

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The opening image is a striking one. A huge rotating pile of books – maybe fifteen feet high in the centre of the stage. Great, I thought, that’s exciting…
…until it isn’t, because it stays there for the whole show (or at least the whole first half – I’m only reviewing that hour of the show – I’ll keep saying it, perhaps the second half was brilliant).

The problem with having a mountain of books in the centre of your stage is that it actually makes the playing space unusable. It takes ages to climb up and down the thing (the actors looking visibly nervous at times as they searched for footholds) and once you’re up there you can’t move. The book mountain is so big that when the actors are down on the stage itself they are either forced into ugly lines at the side or at the front, or they have to play upstage to whatever poor bugger is perched on the top of the books. The situation is made worse when a bloody great trap is opened downstage centre, leaving the actors literally nowhere to go but to hang around on the periphery like unwanted interlopers on a stage full of stuff and holes. As a piece of design it’s completely inept, demonstrating a woeful lack of basic stage craft by either the director, the designer or both.

And don’t get me started on the use of projection in place of painted cloths or physical structures – we saw a bit of it in Funfair as well – a visual trope that dominates the stage but simultaneously renders it flat, sterile and artless. Oh this isn’t some luddite prejudice on my behalf – it’s about the basics of stage craft. If you’re projecting an image onto a massive cloth, it necessitates a large amount of evenly distributed light. This flattens out the stage picture and makes it impossible to establish a spatial focus on the stage, nor any tactile sense of atmosphere. There’s no way the performers can interact with it. It’s no more emotionally engaging than the wallpaper you have on your computer home screen.

Finally, what’s the deal with Walter M’s productions that two out of the three I’ve seen have featured young women in tight shorts? There may have even been some tight shorted women in Romeo and Juliet, I don’t remember. I certainly disliked it in Funfair but in this children’s show it seems completely inappropriate.

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What’s with the young women in shorts?

Ok. Enough already. I think you get that I didn’t enjoy my evening, but I can’t sign off from this review without reference to the ‘fight’. If anyone reading this has seen the show, can they explain that to me, please?

So about three quarters of the way through the first half, the characters have a fight (absolutely no idea why) but for some reason they do it like the kind of mark-through that a fight director asks for in rehearsal before acting the combat for real. They just stand there doing these half hearted fist movements, with badly timed reactions. It seems to go on for ages and I actually had to cover my eyes at that point.

Sorry, sorry, one more thing….  Did I mention the completely random fire dance? No? Again if anyone’s seen the show and can tell me what that was about please feel free to contribute.

Okay, I hold my hands up, a blog dedicated to a demolition job on one show is not a dignified use of social media. But the reason I feel so strongly is because it does speak to something bigger.

duty_calls

The last time I saw professional theatre in Manchester of this low standard, was when Ben Twist was running Contact Theatre back in the late 1990s. It has the same pretentious, dead hearted negation of the joys of stagecraft… which ultimately sounded the death nell for that fantastic venue as a major producing house in the city (although it has since been reborn with a different brief). That cannot be allowed to happen here.

Mr Meierjohann clearly has high aspirations to push the theatrical jiffy bag and challenge our expectations. When the regime at Home is discussed in theatrical circles it is sometimes said that those who express criticism are being too British, too conservative, too resistant to the ‘European’ style of stage direction that Meierjohann is bringing to Manchester. Well, for the record I’m about as pro-European as it gets and I’ve enjoyed all sorts of amazing international work over my three decades in the entertainment industries. I contend that if Walter were from Swindon he would simply be written off as not quite up to the job. If anything, the ‘European’ tag is used as an excuse, and confuses a presentational style that has the patina of ‘other’ and ‘sophistication’, with the misplaced belief that this ‘otherness’ somehow negates the need for coherent narrative, structure, focus, content, passion, humour, elation and beauty.

Having made a sad comparison to the fate of the old Contact Theatre, a few years earlier, at that same venue, Bryan Elsley adapted and directed a gripping and visceral production of Alan Garner’s Elidor as their 1992 Christmas show. This was theatrical storytelling for a young adult audience at its very finest. It is possible to do amazing things when offering an alternative to the normal fare on offer for family audiences in the season of Panto and Jacqueline Wilson and spinoffs from TV and CBBC/CBeebies favourites.

What Bryan (more famous for Skins and the TV adaptation of The Crow Road) has, is a highly attuned sense of narrative – of the temporal nature of storytelling – of how to connect to an audience and take us into a world that we just don’t want to leave. Elidor was magical, frightening (in the best Christmas ghost story sense of the word), contemporary, and entirely involving. I watched a cynical crowd of reluctant year nines and tens from Rusholme and Moss Side turn into a thrilled buzzing throng as they left the theatre on that cold night in December 92. I’ve never forgotten it. I think this is what Walter Meierjohann is aspiring to, but sadly he is never going to realise it until he starts to respect the skills required to achieve it. He may sincerely believe that he already does, but on the evidence of three productions I see no sign that he respects the imperatives of narrative story telling, nor the nature of scene structure, nor design, nor how to use a stage, nor how to guide the audience’s eyes and their emotions by shaping his staging to bring focus and intention to every moment of the action.

So do I have some personal gripe with Mr M? I’ve never met the man. I hold no personal beef. I don’t need a job from him; he’s never turned me down for a job… but he is holding the reins to what should be the most important producing venue in Manchester – equal to or surpassing The Royal Exchange. Theatres are resource hungry, expensive, valuable places, and if they are paid for by a community, if they belong to the community, then I believe with all my municipal heart that it’s fair and right to hold them to account.

On the Home website the venue describes itself in the following terms:

‘...our mission is to make a new HOME for curiosity seekers, for lovers of the dramatic, the digital and the deeply engaging; for radicals and reciprocators.‘

I have a degree, a post graduate diploma and thirty-two years professional experience and I have absolutely no idea what that means. Except that it alliterates. What I do know is that Home’s current artistic director programmes like a man who has never had to worry about the cost of babysitting, or parking, or think about how attractive a show has to be for a normal person making leisure choices when resources are limited and day to day life is stressful and exhausting. And if he doesn’t understand that, then he doesn’t understand people – and it’s unlikely that he’s going to produce theatre that will strike a chord in the heart of the community he is there to serve.

If I seem harsh it’s because this is our money he’s spending, our resources he’s using, and our artistic landscape he’s shaping… but so far, it’s not a landscape I could in any way call Home.

But, hey, at least there weren’t any enigmatic clowns.

Sad Clown

 

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There really is no place like Home…

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Martin Jameson in Manchester Home, Manchester Theatre, Theatre

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ödön Von Horváth, Simon Stephens, The Funfair, Walter Meierjohann

‘If you can’t say anything nice then don’t say anything at all’

Grrr. How this aphoristic bleat sets my teeth on edge. As if criticism has to be balanced to be valid.

No it doesn’t.

But, having returned last night from watching The Funfair at Manchester’s new arts super-venue, Home, I am overwhelmed by such extreme feelings of distress about pretty much every aspect of the production, that demanding some kind of positive, constructive response from myself seems essential for my own mental well being.

Ok… so the new theatre space is good. Sitting in the upper circle, it feels satisfyingly intimate. Acoustics are excellent. Sight lines aren’t bad. It’s nice to see a new theatre with a good high proscenium – and a balanced thrust that draws the proscenium playing space into the auditorium. All of these will be used to imaginative effect by designers in future productions. Great work WILL be done in this exciting new theatre.

The music is well executed. The sound is clear and well balanced… But what it has to with anything in the production, I really couldn’t say. Plus they’re dressed as clowns which seems to be confusing the fair with the circus, but, hey, what do I know?

Sad Clown

My theatrical alarm bells always start ringing when enigmatic clowns appear…

The design – set and costumes – is occasionally clever but alienatingly unattractive (whoops, starting to slip…) BUT on a positive note… both elements are well executed. There is a good standard of finish, and it sets the bar high for the presentation of future shows. A lot of people worked their socks off to make this look good.

And the cast….

Oh bollox. Now I’m really struggling. I absolutely don’t want to criticise a gang of actors, who, after all, are only doing what they’re told, but my merry ship of positivity has just run aground, holed below the waterline….

The thing is, who knows what this cast are capable of? I’ve no reason to think they are anything other than highly competent actors in their own right – but the play is so bloody dreary they are scuppered before they even set sail. And it’s the choice of material which is at the core of everything that dismays me about this show.

The Funfair is a new adaptation of a play called Kasimir and Karoline by Ödön Von Horváth, dating from 1929, which the programme and Home’s publicity repeatedly tells us is a twentieth century masterpiece.

No it isn’t.

The programme also tells us that Ödön Von Horváth is a truly great writer, on a par with – if not better than – Bertolt Brecht, and the only reason we haven’t heard of him is because he died when he was 37.

No he isn’t, and no, it isn’t. Although admittedly the age thing might explain why no one has ever heard of Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Christopher Marlowe, Joe Orton….  Director Walter Meierjohann insists in the programme that Horváth is funnier than Brecht, which, judging by the awful tumbleweed moments that greeted every gag last night, is a bit like saying that Myra Hindley was kinder to children than King Herod.

Actually, hands up, I am being unfair. The adaptation is by Simon Stephens and as I don’t speak German, and have never encountered the original, I suppose it is just possible that the brilliant humour and general ‘masterpiece-ness’ has somehow got lost in translation. And when I say lost, I’m talking major solar-storm-knocking-out-the-whole-GPS-system-the-day-after-every-ordnance-survey-map-has-been-burned-by-a-mad-map-burning-despot. That kind of lost.

However I normally like Simon Stephens – his adaptation of Curious Incident is superb, so I’m afraid I’m still eyeing the source material with suspicion.

What’s it about?

Ehm…. Well there’s a northern bloke in a string vest called Cash (Geddit???) who’s lost his job as a driver two days before the start of the play. The idea of looking for a new job seems to have eluded him, and instead he has been thrown into an existential crisis. Ok… so I’m not endorsing the Norman Tebbit ‘on your bike’ philosophy, but losing a driving job – when driving jobs, by their very nature, are rarely permanent anyway – hardly seems to be emblematic of mass unemployment. Are we supposed to take it as read that this man will never work again? He seems to have given up on page one. It’s hard to sympathise with such a useless self pitying git. But he is wearing a string vest, which makes him working class, and therefore some kind of hero.

Anyway, string vest northern bloke is at the fair with Caroline. I can’t tell you anything about her except that she wears a translucent frock and we can see her underwear. I have no idea who she actually is, what she does for a living, what class she is, what her dreams and aspirations are… She doesn’t appear to have any character whatsoever, apart from being Cash’s fiancée. However the change in his employment status seems to be jeopardising their relationship.

So clearly not much of a relationship.

Add to this a shouty sweary scouser in leather trousers and a leather pork pie hat. I have no idea who this guy is – apart from being an annoying stereotype. So, shouty scouser (who says ‘fuck’ – or ‘fochhhhh’ – a lot) has some kind of relationship with a miserable tall girl in silver hot pants. But he throws beer in her face randomly so that doesn’t seem to be going too well either.

Then there’s a nerdy Welsh bloke who looks a bit like Steven Merchant who gets involved with Caroline for a bit and eats ice creams. I say Welsh… for one whole scene he adopted a strong Liverpool accent. I have absolutely no idea whether this was deliberate or not.

Enter two more stereotypes – a middle aged comb-over northern capitalist, complete with cigar (straight out of a George Grosz cartoon), and a posh southern type. They eat fried chicken and letch over the women.

Once these characters, such as they are, are established, there is much shouting, and gurning, and chasing around; some stuff about a Zeppelin; some tin cans – a LOT of tin cans – fall from the flies; there’s a freak show introduced by a Baron Samedi figure where a blue gorilla woman with a giant Where-The-Wild-Things-Are head sings a song; theres a LOT of extremely bad ‘drunk’ acting: there’s some plot about Caroline going to Blackpool in the Bentley belonging to the Northern Capitalist; and then there’s some kind of fight where people get injured and sing Buddy Holly; and finally string-vest gets off with silver-hot-pants.

And did I mention the MC/ringmaster (Again with the circus/fair confusion???) who is a short actor and who occasionally narrates (and is actually the best thing in it)? Oh yes, and there are those musicians in their clown make-up…

Sad Clown

The clown guitarist kept wandering round the stage being sinister

…who play from a glass box and occasionally wander on stage for no particular reason.

And while I’m at it… The Funfair? Why are they at a funfair? What kind of fair is it supposed to be? It’s nothing I recognise – apart from being a really shit funfair no one would ever go to. Oh? What’s that you say?
It’s symbolic.
Symbolic of what? When you’ve got a moment…. In your own time….
Capitalism..?
Listen sunshine, for a symbol – a metaphor – an allegory – to work, it has to convince in its own right. We have to believe in the funfair as a real place in order for its symbolic meaning to have any traction. Otherwise it’s just a ham fisted device.

And where is this bloody awful funfair anyway? Germany with its Zeppelins and George Grosz caricatures, or Platt Fields in Manchester (as Stephens suggests in the programme) where the most aspirational thing the female lead can dream of is a trip to Blackpool in a Bentley?

We don’t aspire to much in t’north.

Finally…. It’s written in 1929, but it’s sort of set now with plastic beer cups, and a rock band playing Iggy Pop numbers (Did I mention the clown make-up? Oh God, did no one say lose the clown make-up?).

Sad Clown

Do you sense I have a problem with clowns?

Oh? What’s that you say? It’s timeless? It’s purposefully non specific and non realistic in its setting so as to draw together the financial and political instability of the 1920s with the social climate in the UK in 2015?

I beg to differ. I put it to you that its locational abstraction renders it incoherent, without relevance to anything in our time, and probably stripping it of its original relevance to 1920s Germany into the bargain.

The programme tells us that the recent UK election was decided by nationalism, which is a parallel to Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Ehm….. So are we supposed to compare the SNP with the Nazi party? Or are we selectively talking about UKIP and just bandying terms around randomly in the vague hope that something will make sense eventually. And are we really comparing the moderate successes of UKIP to the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s? There are vague topological similarities, but to go further than that is to be simplistic and ahistorical in the extreme.

Stephens pronounces that the play demonstrates ‘a compassion for the poor and [is] a celebration of their capacity for poetry and wonder’. Not that he’s being patronising or anything. Nor did I spot much ‘poetry and wonder’ amid the gaggle of shouting stereotypes that populated the stage last night. But no, he insists that it’s ‘a working class play that examines the lives of ordinary people’; it’s ‘Manchester’s great undiscovered play’.  No it isn’t.  It may be a lot of things, but, objectively, neither of those descriptions are applicable.  Everything about this show is middle class – Ödön Von Horváth was the son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat; Stephens is from Stockport originally but hasn’t lived here for a very long time; the production is artsy, knowing and oblique in its staging. I should add that as a fully paid up member of the middle classes myself I have no issue with my own roots, but I really object to people making bogus class claims to give their work added “credibility”.

I could bang on and on and on about this, but I’ll stop now and try to draw some meaning out of the whole uncomfortable mess.

The key issue is that the play itself is really very poor. And this frustrates me because this is the inaugural production of what ought to be an amazing new Manchester venue that speaks to the whole of the city….

It’s called Home remember!!

But what does it offer us? A German play from the 1920s, which may or may not be a masterpiece, crudely anglicised by transposing the characters to shouty northern stereotypes and presenting it as a piece of incoherent quasi expressionist pretentious misrerabilism.

Somewhere at the very heart of this artistic enterprise – which should be beating in time to the heart of the community who are paying for it – something has gone very wrong indeed.

I remember Ken Campbell once describing BBC Director General John Birt as: ‘…an alien, inadequately briefed’.

That’s how I feel about director Walter Meierjohann. His appointment is a piece of bold internationalism. I love Europe. I love European art, music, theatre, cinema. I will be voting to stay in the EU at the referendum. But the cultural Babelfish in Meierjohann’s ear is seriously taking the piss.

But hey, don’t listen to me, it’s garnered some wonderful reviews – five stars from The Times, four from the Observer…. And I can understand that national reviewers would want to look favourably at the opening production of a new venue, when we stand on the edge of what are likely to be horrifically lean times for publicly funded live performance. In that respect, I absolutely understand those who will no doubt balk at what appears to be the vociferous negativity of this blog. But art never got anywhere by developing a laager mentality, or pulling up the drawbridge on the fundamentals of its own standards.

I want Home to be better than this. I want coherence, content, excitement – and more than anything, I want it to be a palace of dramatic stories that actually illuminate the community where I live. You can’t just throw material at us and hope that a few northern accents, some tenuous historical cross-referencing, and a bit of tricksy video projection will make it “relevant”.

It won’t. No amount of clown make-up, or maniacally laughing grotesques, or posing super-numeries can paper over the worryingly hollow artifice of this production. The Emperor not only has no clothes, on this showing he is staggering around, punch drunk, in a pair of somewhat threadbare Y-fronts.

So – in the spirit of saying something constructive or shutting up – how to find him some nicer threads to put on…? I’m not a Mancunian, I’m an outsider of sorts, but I’ve spent more than half my life here, so maybe I have something positive to share with Mr Meierjohann.

What I love about this city is that, yes, it has its problems, but the reason it is spearheading initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse and is always changing and growing and leading the way is because it doesn’t waste much time sitting around feeling sorry for itself, or wallowing in simplistic political/class narratives. Manchester is steeped in extraordinary history – much of which has resonated around the planet. It’s not a city of victims. The meanings to be drawn from this history and the way its communities are constantly evolving, are complex and nuanced.

There’s a dry humour – driven by plain speaking, and a contempt for anything that smacks of pretension. It’s a humour that expects the worst – but is underpinned by pride, passion, ambition, self assurance and hope.

My plea to you Walter… take the dodgy Babelfish out of your ear…. and listen. You obviously know how to polish up a nifty bit of stage craft. Listen to the heart of the place you’re calling Home. Listen to it beating. And put that on your fantastic new stage.

If you don’t, you’ll drive us away, and it won’t be ‘Home’ to anyone. Please make it somewhere a lot of people are going to want to be, because if this is a taster of what’s to come, I’m genuinely worried that it won’t be.

Oh yes…. And lose the clown make-up. Please lose the clown make-up.

Sad Clown

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