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

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Category Archives: Manchester Theatre

More Oldham Questions

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by Martin Jameson in Local Government, Manchester Theatre, Oldham Coliseum, Theatre

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arts Council England, Maxine Peake, Oldham Coliseum, Oldham Council

Shame, shame, and shame again on Arts Council England and Oldham Council for effectively giving the finger to Oldham Coliseum, their audiences, and all the professionals who have worked there over the years, by not having the balls to come and be accountable for their decisions at the public meeting held at the theatre last night (Tuesday 21st February).

A lively audience heard speeches from Maxine Peake (right), Equity President Lynda Rooke (left) and writer Ian Kershaw (Writers Guild). Meanwhile Arts Council England snubbed the event and were rightfully ’empty chaired’ (centre).

It was a very moving event attended by well over 400 people – not just actors and technicians and creatives, but community activists, and, most importantly, life-long audience members for whom Oldham Coliseum is a totemic part of their identity. But the decision makers, and purse string holders, snubbed the event – despite being promised a fair and respectful hearing – telling the organisers that they were only prepared to have ‘private’ meetings.

Earlier in the day, Oldham Council (presumably with ACE’s blessing) rushed out a press release heralding plans for a shiny new £24m theatre.

An artist’s impression of the proposed new Coliseum building, notably without a fly tower, and reported without on site rehearsal space. There will be fewer seats and a much smaller stage.

But we’ve been here before with plans announced and shelved. If they had a coherent case to make… why not come and make it? By not turning up both bodies looked weak and rude and defensive – and worst of all it added to the sense that the new plans were to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. There is very little trust that this is going to happen, and that lack of trust was amplified by the failure of ACE and the Council to come and argue their corner.

According to Chris Lawson, the Coliseum’s Artistic Director and CEO, the new plans don’t include a rehearsal space (contrary to what is said in the press release), nor a fly tower, and has fewer seats – thus making the business model even more challenging. It really does sound like a ‘performance space’ rather than an actual theatre. There are voices at the Council who have said they are keen for it to remain a producing house, but this isn’t fully endorsed by ACE and seems to fade in and out like an old fashioned radio signal depending which reports you read. I sense that no one in charge understands the difference between a ‘performance space’ and a ‘theatre’ which is so much more.

Questions remain unanswered as to the fate of the £1.8m denied to the theatre but entrusted to Oldham Council which is yet to indicate how the money will be spent, or if there will be a transparent process by which creatives can apply for project money in the absence of the theatre itself. Indeed is there anyone on the Council with the expertise to manage such a fund? As Chris Lawson said, the Arts Council appear to have rejected the Coliseum’s plans for being ‘too risky’ – but exchanged them for ‘no plan whatsoever’ – ! – which a reasonable person might consider to be even riskier.

It was a massive misjudgement by Arts Council England and Oldham Council not to show up. It demonstrated contempt for the communities they are there to serve. How ACE have the brass neck to make people bidding for funds jump through hoops in terms of ‘engagement’ when they are too arrogant to ‘engage’ with anyone who might disagree with them.

And as for Oldham Council. It’s sickening to see a Labour Council (adopts Kinnock voice: ‘a Labour council!’) treating its constituents with such disregard. If local democracy is to mean anything, then those councillors need to feel it in the ballot box.

If ACE and Oldham Council are serious about providing a new theatre then why on earth wouldn’t they be jumping over each other to come and enthuse about the future and more importantly consult with the ‘stakeholders’ (I hate that word!) about what that space needs to be. The stakeholders were all there last night, in one place, but treated as if their views were of no relevance.

The Stakeholders were all there.

But even without the key players, it was a good meeting and genuinely inspirational as people talked about the community involvement and the theatre’s practical role as a cultural hub with regard to new writing, the South Asian and Roma communities, and its role in promoting performance skills for young people in the most deprived borough in Greater Manchester. There was a lot more of a sense of how important the theatre is beyond its core task of putting on shows than I was expecting.

The evening rounded off with Equity Campaigns Officer, Gareth Forest, reassuring the assembly that all the questions raised would not only be put to the Arts Council, but that he would remind them that anyone posing such a question ought to be in the room to do it person. He ended by directing people to the campaign website where you can scroll down for a handy guide to who to write to in support of the theatre. Please please please do click on the link and let’s fill the inboxes of everyone involved so that they can’t pretend this tsunami of passion can possibly be ignored again.

If the Marmoset seems a little out of sorts, then you’d be right. It’s hard to express quite how low my opinion of ACE is right now so if you are involved with ACE then I’m looking at you too. Grow up, show some maturity, and tell your colleagues to grow up while you’re at it. You are paid for out of the public purse, you have a duty to be fully accountable – and to ‘engage’ with the people who pay your wages.

Addendum:
Following Tuesday’s no-show at the public meeting to which they were invited (and since the Marmoset put paw to paper to scribble the above blog) the Arts Council has issued a formal statement which you can read in full, here. Laura Dyer, Deputy Chief Executive of ACE was also interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on Saturday 25th February, which you can listen to here. Aside from the tin-eared nature of the following statement…

Only someone with a completely London-centric perspective, ignorant of the geography, the appalling public transport or any inkling of how a community such as Oldham works or engages with the world could write such a sentence in this context as if it somehow made the decision more acceptable.

…neither utterance adds much to the debate. It’s still baffling that the management of the Coliseum is attacked, blaming their application as ‘too risky’ and yet it’s deemed preferable to give the £1.8m to a body that neither applied for it, nor, as yet, has coherent plans for it. But more alarmingly – very alarmingly – there is no commitment, either in the written statement nor in Ms Dyer’s interview, to maintaining a resident, permanent producing company.

A ‘performing space’ is a building, not a theatre company. No one would describe the Oldham Coliseum as ‘a performance space’ because it is so so so much more than that.

It is very very hard indeed not to infer that the reason that neither ACE nor Oldham Council want to engage directly with stakeholders in a public forum is that they are unable or unwilling to address the questions around these two issues that would doubtless come their way. By issuing statements, and refusing to engage publicly with stakeholders, they project a bunker mentality which only adds to the prevailing sense of distrust. They can fix this very easily. If their ideas for the future of the Coliseum are tenable and exciting, come and tell us how great they are. If they’re as good as they believe them to be, then they will stand up to public scrutiny, and we’ll all be very happy, and go home dancing.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

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The Oldham Question(s)

10 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by Martin Jameson in Manchester Theatre, Oldham Coliseum, Theatre

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Arts Council England, Oldham Coliseum, Oldham Council

While the fate of a small auditorium in the North of England may hardly seems like headline grabbing material, the recent announcement that Oldham’s Coliseum theatre is to lose its long term Arts Council funding has made national news in the UK, not just because it has a 135 year history and been pivotal in the careers of dozens of actors treasured by TV audiences around the world; not just because it is a keystone of Oldham’s cultural history; but because the decision rings an ominous, warning bell to vulnerable theatres across the country.

It may be humble in appearance, but who wouldn’t want to go to a theatre located on Fairbottom Street?

Such is the affection for the building amongst theatre professionals and audiences alike, there have been howls of protest. In the wake of this considerable outcry, finding its way to national press and TV news platforms, Jen Cleary, from Arts Council North, braved the airwaves on Sunday morning (5th February) to face questions from Andrew Edwards on allFM’s Artbeat show (Part 2 of that interview can be heard here).

The main takeaway was that, when funds are stretched like never before, the theatre’s application for three-year NPO (National Portfolio Organisation) funding simply wasn’t up to muster, leaving the listener to infer that there were wider concerns about the Coliseum’s overall management and governance. Instead, £1.8m has been ‘ring-fenced’ for Oldham Council to spend on arts provision in the town while plans for a new ‘performing space’ are developed. 

Oldham Council for their part has been vocal on Twitter making it clear that they ‘don’t have the ability to transfer or give this funding to the Coliseum’.

But before the dust could settle on any of this, Sarah Maxfield, ACE’s Area North Director told the Oldham Times on Wednesday morning that while the theatre’s NPO bid has been deemed too much of a ‘risk’, there will be seven months of transitional ‘project’ funding available from April to October on a pro-rata basis equaling just under £359,000. 

Confused? Yes, you and a good deal of the North-West’s theatre community. Whether Ms. Cleary knew about this partial U-turn when she argued so decisively for the withdrawal of funds just three days earlier is impossible to ascertain, only adding to the sense that all the bodies in question are pulling in different directions at the same time, with an incoherent narrative changing almost daily.

Of course, it’s a positive that there seems to be some small stay of execution (although we are yet to hear from the Coliseum itself who are keeping a respectful silence following the sad death of their much-loved general manager, Lesley Chenery at the weekend) but these statements seem to pose more questions than they answer.

Whether the Coliseum’s 3-year NPO application was genuinely unfit for purpose none of us can know without details being made public, but it strikes me that’s hardly the point. Both Ms. Maxfield and Ms. Cleary argue that there was stiff competition and all applications are held to the same standard which the theatre didn’t meet. 

But are they the same standards? Should they be? If, for example, Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre went through a rough patch, messed up the money, struggled to maintain audience numbers, put in an unsuitable NPO application would ACE withdraw their funding? Of course they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare, and for good reason. They would recognise the Exchange’s crucial role in the artistic infrastructure of the North West and send in a hit squad to fix it. They would value its artistic critical mass and do everything possible to preserve it despite any short-term failure. They would respect a heritage spanning decades, not to mention the livelihoods dependent on it. But, for some reason, the Coliseum, at the heart of a far more deprived community, and with a much longer heritage, when ‘levelling-up’ is supposedly a priority, hasn’t earned that kind of pro-active intervention. 

Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre is an extraordinary building, and the Marmoset can’t see it being allowed to fail. Different standards apply.

And all of this is in the context of the soon-to-be-opened Factory International in Manchester city centre, already amply served for cultural venues, which has run £100m over budget and is predicted to cost well over £200m in total.

So is one reputedly poor NPO application for £1.8m over three years really worth more than all of that? It seems very hard to argue that it is.

Equally, it’s hard not to infer that the NPO argument is an excuse, cover for another, perhaps unstated agenda of some sort. If that sounds over the top, all I can say is that I started my theatre career in 1983 and if every building I’ve worked for that ran into trouble had lost its Arts Council funding then the whole idea of building based theatre would have collapsed decades ago. It is accepted that buildings – historic companies – have a value that goes beyond process. In my (frighteningly long) experience, ‘process’ is nearly always used as an excuse for other, often political agendas.

Oldham Council claim they are developing a new £24m theatre for the town, which will be fantastic if it happens, but these plans have been on and off since 2017 and there is no clear timetable for when construction will start let alone when the venue will open. Indeed, the report in The Oldham Times makes it sound like a very distant prospect indeed. When the old Leeds Playhouse was replaced by the shiny new West Yorkshire Playhouse, Jude Kelly was in place as artistic director to oversee a seamless transition (or so it seemed to a young Marmoset working there at the time). Leeds Council recognised that it needed a theatre-maker’s expertise to help design the building and define its purpose and, crucially, to preserve the company’s continuity in the city. When Manchester’s Library Theatre closed to make way for HOME, that closure was planned years in advance. As transitions go, what’s happening in Oldham seems decidedly clumsy by comparison.

ACE says that the Coliseum’s application wasn’t adequate but does that mean that Oldham Council put in a better application of their own? It’s hard to believe that a local authority would bid against its own theatre. So did they or didn’t they? 

If they did, what were its objectives, which every other public body applying for cash has to define? We have a right to know. Crucially, what are the processes by which practitioners can access the council’s new project fund to provide the promised arts and culture to the town? If the council’s application sparkled above the theatre’s own, it seems odd that no mechanism has yet been disclosed as to how the money will be allocated. And when the council tweets that it ‘does not have the ability to give this funding to the Coliseum’ does they mean they don’t wish to for internal reasons, or that ACE has told them they can’t? Who is pulling the strings here? It seems to the casual observer like a very peculiar and unwieldy arrangement.

But, if the council didn’t make a formal application, but now, at the Arts Council’s behest have access to the £1.8m, that’s hardly a level playing field contingent on objective criteria. How on earth did that come to pass? It’s contradictory to argue for the withholding of funds from one organisation because their application wasn’t good enough, if the body you then give the funds to made no formal application at all. 

If artists – and taxpayers – all around the country – are to trust the decisions made by Arts Council England and local authorities, at the very least, we need transparency. I don’t have a problem with change, but I desperately want to have confidence that if a precious cultural resource is to be allowed to die, there is a rock solid plan – more than just a vague proposition! – to replace it with something better.

Until we get that transparency, it’s very hard to have that kind of confidence.

If you’re in the area, and you care about the future of locally based theatre, click here for details

A public meeting has been scheduled for 21st February, organised by the actors’ union, Equity, so hopefully all the bodies involved will be ready with the answers that we, as practitioners, taxpayers and audiences, deserve.

At the very least it should be a lively evening.

(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)

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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.

home

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…

CJjoAPfWsAARgiK

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!

Sad Clown

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.

geoffroy1

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.

14577

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?

miranda-bookstack-horiz._CB189854584_

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.

1363015801_779hourglass

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.

JS78563676

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.

INKHEART-for-web-628x460-628x460-400x250

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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