First it was Martin Crimp that has divided audiences and critics alike with Attempts on Her Life, as I have previously blogged about here. Now I find myself at serious odds with others on The Wonderful World of Dissocia, the Anthony Neilson play originally seen at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 and now revived in a National Theatre of Scotland production that has come to the Royal Court. As Michael Billington noted in his Guardian review, “No one, I suspect, will be indifferent to Anthony Neilson’s play about dissociative identity disorder. Some were audibly exasperated; others stayed to cheer.”
I missed last Friday’s press performance, but caught up with it on Tuesday evening instead, where I ran into Laura Wade, the young playwright who, in 2005, had two excellent plays on simultaneously, Colder than Here (at Soho) and Breathing Corpses (at the Royal Court), and she told me she was seeing it for the second time already. (Mind you, I also ran into the National’s platforms manager, Angus MacKechnie, last night, and he’d seen Attempts on Her Life twice already as well.)
These kind of enthusiasms – from intelligent people of the theatre – cannot be easily dismissed. And both Crimp and Neilson are both stretching the envelope for a new kind of working. But while the Crimp (and certainly as produced in Katie Mitchell’s video-led production) might be considered to be a rarefied kind of experimentalism, Neilson insists that he’s trying to reach a wider public: In an interview in The London Paper on Tuesday, he complained that theatre has “become a very insular medium. When people talk about experimental theatre, they think about some weird sort of performance arts. But in fact a lot of theatre now is experimental in the sense that it’s really conceived for other theatre professionals to come and see.” Whereas, he insists, “People will come to Dissocia and they will completely get it. What I can guarantee them is that they won’t be bored and they won’t walk out feeling stupid. They’ll be entertained, there’s a lot of humour in it, there’s songs, it’s very colourful. But there is a very serious point to it, but one that’s delivered in an interesting way. It’s a show that I think anyone can go and see, but that has a lot of stuff that people can think about”.
Of course in the theatre there are no guarantees, and it’s dangerous to make those kind of boasts. Neither I nor the friend I took “got it”. In fact, my friend went so far as to state afterwards that it was positively the worst show he’d ever seen: he felt utterly insulted by the first act and the poor writing of it; and utterly bored by the second.
O brave new theatrical world, if such be the wonders within it! Yet according to an interview with Neilson in The Times last week, he is “on the verge, he thinks, of defining nothing less than ‘the next movement in British theatre’. He’s calling it ‘psychoabsurdism’ -a wild, non-naturalistic theatre (akin, he admits, to the films of David Lynch) in which anything can happen. ‘I’m giving as much time to the inner life as the outer life,’ he says. ‘When you dramatise mental states, your limits are only what the mind can think of. You can have humour, and surprising shifts in tone. You can have songs. You can have dance.” He thinks that it is the responsibility of artists to reach out to the “95 per cent of the population who think theatre is an irrelevance. My shows are very accessible. I’ve never believed that experimentation means unpopularity.’
But his last Royal Court outing, The Lying Kind in 2002, was unpopular – so unpopular, according to an interview that Neilson gave to Time Out’s Jane Edwardes, that Ian Rickson’s Royal Court apparently cancelled another commission it had with him after its failure. A shocked Neilson retreated home to Scotland to lick his wounds, and as he complained to Jane, “the measure of a theatre like that is not how ecstatic it becomes when you succeed, but how it rallies around you after failure.”
But now he’s back at the Royal Court as the opening shot of Dominic Cooke’s new regime there, albeit in a production from the National Theatre of Scotland that is merely using the Court as a transfer house, so he is back in the fold.
But though he works in an experimental manner – the script isn’t prescriptive but is developed during rehearsal – he insists the goal is more experiential than experimental. According to the Time Out interview, “I like to put people into a state where they no longer have any intellectual defences.” As Jane’s piece concludes, “These days, Neilson wants to draw on elements of popular theatre: the spectacle, the songs, the dances and gags. Improbably, he says with pride that he sees himself as being in the same business as Bruce Forsyth. While always pessimistic about whether he’ll ever get another play staged, he’s also unusually excited: ‘I truly do feel that my best work is still ahead of me. I’m getting somewhere with finding a form for myself. I think perhaps I was overly serious and intense when I was younger and now I am completely converted to the feeling of people laughing and enjoying themselves and to using that as a tool.’
But what if you don’t laugh and enjoy yourself? Then there’s no lonelier place to be. And while this is a play in which a woman searches for a lost hour in her life, it left me searching for the two and a half I’d lost watching it….
Well Mark, of course you're wrong about Dissocia. Take a leaf out of Laura Wade's book and go and see it again. But have a glass of champagne first.
But as ever you are deliciously even-handed - even in a pan.
This is the tenuous excuse that I have for hijacking your blog to paste in an article by a man clearly without your good manners or qualm.
It is by the New York Post's extraordinary Broadway correspondent Michael "The Needle" Reidel. It made me laugh so much I nearly bust my stays.
Read on ....
'GREASE' & DESIST
TV WINNERS NOT BOX-OFFICE GOLD Max Crumm and Laura Osnes will play Danny and Sandy in "Grease."
April 4, 2007 -- THE folks involved in "Grease" have been brag ging for a week now about ticket sales - $9 million and counting for a revival that doesn't open until July.
What they haven't been talking about is a little misfire that happened last Monday, the day after the final installment of "You're the One That I Want," the NBC reality show from which the stars of the revival were cast.
The phones at Ticketmaster were, I'm told, ringing off the hook because a lot of viewers who bought tickets to "Grease" weren't happy with the actors chosen to play Danny and Sandy: Max Crumm (change the name, kid) and Laura Osnes.
"There was a bit of a frenzy because a lot of people wanted Austin and Ashley to win," says a source. "They wanted their money back."
Austin Miller and Ashley Spencer were the runners-up.
The source says extra people had to be added to the phone banks to handle the calls.
A spokesman for the show denies there was a "substantial number of calls" for refunds, and that the advance continues to grow.
All this crowing about the box office strikes me as face-saving, since "You're the One That I Want" was a ratings loser. Eight million people watched last week's final installment, which is about, oh, 30 million viewers shy of the audience for "American Idol" and 20 million shy of the audience for "Dancing With the Stars."
The show did marginally better than the Tony Awards, but that's like saying Alan Keyes did marginally better in New Hampshire than Dennis Kucinich.
The "Grease" team is also acutely aware that the Broadway community despised "You're the One That I Want." The only insider I know who was able to stomach every episode was writer and performer Seth Rudetsky. And that, I hope, is only because Playbill.com paid him to write a column about it every week.
The rest of Broadway was put off by the cheesy production values, poorly staged musical numbers and cookie-cutter nobodies who auditioned to play Danny and Sandy.
Crumm (that name again!) and Osnes are notable only because they were the least attractive of the lot.
Two members of the "Grease" team who are really taking a licking are producer David Ian and writer Jim Jacobs, who, along with director Kathleen Marshall, were the TV show's judges.
Ian, a former actor (sorry I missed his Hamlet), came off as a desperate Simon Cowell wannabe whose skin was the color of Tang and whose teeth looked as if they were whitened during the commercial breaks. Theater people who know him well say he still hungers for the spotlight. At yearly producer conferences (held in sunny places where he can deepen that Tang tan), Ian "loves to give speeches," a source says. "He can't get to the stage fast enough."
Jacobs, insiders say, came off as a pompous oaf.
"He wrote one show ['Grease'] and carried on like he was Jule Styne," says one producer.
As for Marshall, she's still popular around Broadway. But, boy, her revival of "Grease" better be good.
"You're the One That I Want" has left everybody - producers, chorus kids, critics, Tony voters, ushers and columnists - so disgusted, we're going to be gunning for the production.
This summer, even Marshall may get it in the neck.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
So Mark? When will you start slagging off shows before you have seen them? Or before they have opened? Go On! Become Mark "The Shark" Shenton. Go On!
I'm obviously sorry that you and your friend didn't enjoy DISSOCIA, Mark (though if it's the worst play he's ever seen, I'd say he's been pretty lucky in his theatregoing)
but I'd just like to correct an understandable misconception.
I have never said that I, personally, am defining a new movement in British theatre. That would be an extraordinarily presumptuous thing to say. I said that I thought the next movement in British theatre would be absurdist in nature but that it would be more informed by psychology than previous absurdist work. In something of an aside, I said you'd probably call it psycho-absurdism. I really didn't mean my comments to be taken as a boast about myself - indeed, I said that one of the key texts would be Caryl Churchill's FAR AWAY. Of course, that all may be complete waffle but I don't think it hurts to get people talking about what the next movement in theatre might be; such things at least generate interest in the medium, which I'm sure is something we both want to do.
Also, as I'm sure you can appreciate, I have a responsibility to my employers and my cast to try and get punters into my shows. As I don't tend to work with well-known actors, I unashamedly have to make bold statements to generate interest but some of my brasher ones should be taken more as debating issues than great offerings of wisdom. I was once compared to a "carnival-huckster" and I'm actually fine with that.
By the way, you say THE LYING KIND was unpopular. The critics didn't like it, for sure, but that's not my measure of unpopularity. They put a lot of people off seeing it but those that did seemed to enjoy it. It is also actually the most commercially successful play I've ever written, and ran for nearly two years in both Sweden and Greece. So it was pretty popular.
It's not so much that I've been "...lucky in (my) theatregoing" - teaching literature encourages me to see a lot of theatre - it's that I tend to choose circumspectly. Mark invited me to DISSOCIA and I'm afraid I found little to recommend it. A glass of champagne, I suspect, would serve little purpose here: good plays require no artificial stimulants. (The Friend)
Well, I didn't like Dissocia either :
http://blackpig.typepad.com/john_morrison/2007/03/dissocia.html
So you are not alone
John and Richard - why don't you come along to the Royal Court this Thursday evening (April 12th) at 10pm when I'll be doing a post-show discussion and you can put your criticisms to me directly in front of an audience who've actually seen the show? No need to watch it again, don't worry; just post here that you're coming and I'll make sure you get in. I'm sure it'll make the evening a lot livelier for everyone! Please try and come.
The DISSOCIA Blog appears to be gathering a momentum and intensity never achieved by the play: postmodernism lives. I imagine the invitation to the psd is well-meant, but I resent (a) the subtext that blogging about the show is somehow unsporting, (b) the tone, and (c) the supposition that my life is as empty as the central character's: that I would value the opportunity to find my way to Sloane Square mid-week at 10pm to discuss... what?
I would normally respond by saying yes, but my Thursday evening is already committed to helping out at a rehearsal of one of those really boring plays that have turned audiences away from the theatre in droves -- Michael Frayn's NOISES OFF.
Considering Anthony Neilson's recently-published argument for the primacy of story in drama (http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2038925,00.html)
and his apparent desire for theatre to reconnect with the non-specialist, entertainment-seeking population, "Dissocia" has to be accounted a spectacular own-goal - no matter how much irritable comment it stimulates on little-read discussion boards.
Well I think your disappointing refusal to attend says everything there is to say. Your vitriolic attacks on my play are driven by your fragile egos, not by any attempt to have a constructive discussion about theatre. Obviously my article upset you all terribly, though John Morrison should not presume to know who I was specifically targeting; in fact, I have quite a lot of respect for the likes of Michael Frayn and many other writers who are derided now as being untrendy.
And Mortlake Fuller's contribution to the "debate" is simply laughable. In what sense does my play qualify as a "spectacular own goal"? It's playing to full or near-full houses every night, the vast majority of the reviews have been favourable and every performance ends with audience members cheering. If you can discount that entirely, then it's no wonder my article irked you, and deeply pleasing to me that it did.
And that is all the time I will spend talking to cowards.
"Your vitriolic attacks... are driven by your fragile egos...." Pot, kettle? What does Mr Neilson's assertion mean in any case? Even were all three bloggers of fragile disposition, why should commenting on a play act as a curative? The premise is meaningless.
Nor are we cowards simply because prior engagements prohibit our attending some post-show discussion on Thursday night. Mr Neilson's position at the cutting edge of contemporary society should have alerted him to the existence of the many forums in which to express opinion about the arts. A blog response, incidentally, is different from an audience talk-shop, and no less valid: the genre-blurring of DISSOCIA shouldn't extend to the real world beyond the perspex screen.
Similarly, I'm unsure as to the meaning of his phrase, "constructive discussion" - under what circumstances is discussion destructive? This could, naturally, be transferred epithet, I suppose.
Finally, I have a problem with the hypothesis of writers being derided as 'untrendy' - presumably by stock Royal Court audiences who only cheer that which they perceive to be 'hip enough' to be seen at. The notion is absurd. Are we to dismiss the great canon of plays history has given us just because it isn't 'trendy' enough for today's stage? What a witless conceit. My 'destructive discussion' ends with the view that last year's superb Cheek by Jowl Barbican production of THE CHANGELING - a work of 1622 - was immeasurably more relevant as a mirror on society now than Mr Neilson's vapid (but trendy) sketchpad.
Can I just say Anthony that as a theatre goer, rather than someone who gets overly caught up in the dynamics of writing rather than creating, that your play is the most powerful piece of visual storytelling that I have seen in the past five years. As a documentary maker that applies to not just the medium of stage but screen as well.
It is an incredibly dynamic and engaging piece which will inevitably divide opinion - but surely it is better to hate than to be indifferent and better to love than to like.
On a deeper level as someone who has been diagnosed with BiPolar and sought out its positives to lead an engaging and fulfilling life you and your superb actors really caught the nub of the dynamic of what it is to be mentally ill. It seems that a lot of people (notably the guardian critic) are overly caught up on how they view mental illness - rather than possibly stopping to realise that the important thing is engaging with what it is like to be in that position.
All the best, and looking forward to catching the play again in Edinburgh in the summer...
Ashley
But what does it all mean?
and
wHAT tIME iS lOVE?
OOH ooh OOH ooh
I am performing Dissocia for my main A2 drama practical exam. I am 17, and even I can see that you idiots have completly missed the point of the peice, of good visual fun, with a serious message. get over yourselves