Bring on the losers… and doing something different(ly)….

I’ve been a fan of the show ever since I saw its National Theatre premiere as part of Nicholas Hytner’s opening season on taking over as artistic director back in 2003, and it still stands out as a stunning statement of intent: to bring in such a bold, challenging and daring original musical into the National Theatre, after the Trevor Nunn years of safe but profitable revivals of shows like Oklahoma!, South Pacific and Anything Goes (the first two of which, at least, may have been bold and challenging in their Broadway day, too, but by the time the NT got around to them had already each had perfectly respectable West End revivals of their own within the previous twenty years, so hardly needed the National to re-stage them again).

But it’s slightly disappointing that, outside of importing Caroline, or Change from Broadway, Hytner’s policy with new musicals also ended where it had begun with Jerry Springer; and also sad to note that its composer Richard Thomas is yet to follow it up with a major original musical of his own (though the re-launched Bristol Old Vic has promised that during the first season of new artistic director Tom Morris, Thomas will premiere the score for his new dance piece, Shoes, at the theatre). Musicals take time to gestate, of course, but in the seventh year of his South Bank regime I want a follow-up!

Meanwhile, though, it’s a real pleasure to be reminded of just how audacious and courageous Jerry Springer really is, and to see not only young audiences responding to it (as I regularly saw them doing so during its runs at both the National and in the West End), but also young performers rising to the show’s musical and dramatic challenges. Here’s the future of musical theatre, on both sides of the footlights; there’s talent in strength here, proving that the rigorous training that Arts Ed famously offers pays off seriously.

Just a couple of months ago, I hosted a seminar on Sondheim’s musicals there as part of a weekly class the students are given in the history of musical theatre; but performing it isn’t about history - it’s about practice. And on Saturday night, I saw a series of performers all ready for their next big leap into the profession; amongst an outstanding bunch, I was particularly struck by Oliver Eyre, who brought terrific presence and an even better voice to the dual roles of Dwight and God.

It was also impressive to see how Gary Sefton’s production, inevitably produced on a shoestring, brought such imaginative reach to the show itself, adding to its reality TV feel by turning us into a studio audience and simultaneously videoing the action and projecting it on TV screens in the auditorium.

That provided an intriguing prelude to my day spent yesterday at the Barbican, where Amsterdam’s Toneelgroep turned the massive main theatre stage into a giant soundstage for their production of Roman Tragedies that magnificently distils and compresses Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra into one continuous, immersive multi-media theatre event that constantly startles and always involves and implicates its audience its galvanising unfolding action as it takes place both in front of us onstage and simultaneously on a large screen above it.

This was potentially the hardest marketing sell of the year: a six-hour Shakespeare show, presented without an interval, in Dutch, at the Barbican. That sentence offers at least four reasons alone, if not more, why it sounded daunting. And I have to admit that I went with a slightly heavy heart — and even built in my contingency plan of escape (the Barbican’s basement cinema - which I regard as my local, since it’s about a ten minute drive from home - was showing the new Coen Brothers film A Serious Man twice last night). But no escape was necessary; the show exerted is own powerful grip from the very beginning, and the time just flew by.

The Barbican’s own marketing motto, emblazoned on the front of its programmes and publicity materials, is “Do something different”; and it is clearly leading the way in doing things differently. Sure, the National Theatre (and in turn the Young Vic) regularly has Katie Mitchell offering her cold, clinical theatre-as-film-set distillations of established stories, in which a film is created, frame by frame, in front of our variously astonished eyes. But you end up watching the film, not a play, and admiring the skill, instead of being properly involved.

Toneelgroep’s method is entirely different: there’s also a film being produced in front of you, but the actors are actually acting full-blooded, fully-conceived performances in real plays, and are not merely puppets in service of the film. And you can either watch it from the stalls, or go onstage and watch from the sides or behind them.

In fact, though it’s quite intriguing to be placed in the heart of the theatrical matter, being onstage proved strangely less satisfying than watching from the front; too often, in fact, you ended up watching the action unfolding on TV monitors stationed everywhere around the stage.

The Barbican’s head of theatre, Louise Jeffreys, had to do a hard sell on critics to persuade us to come - she wrote to us personally the week before last when we hadn’t booked in to see it, and told us, “I’ve been programming performances here for the last 10 years and I really believe it’s one of the most significant theatre events we’ve ever presented. When I saw it, it was performed in Dutch with French surtitles and though I don’t speak much French or any Dutch it was one of the most lucid productions of Shakespeare I have seen, it truly crossed all language barriers. As you know, at the Barbican it will be performed in Dutch with English surtitles which can be easily viewed from any vantage point as they are transmitted via several screens on stage. It’s a fresh and thrilling approach to Shakespeare in which you can watch the action close-up on the stage amongst the actors; an innovative and ambitious use of multi-media and new technology; outstanding acting and a performance style reminiscent of reportage which creates a thrilling, contemporary political arena.” She added, “Roman Tragedies was the hit of the Avignon Festival last year and has been lauded in New York, Amsterdam and wherever it has been shown. The director of the piece, Ivo van Hove, is one of the world’s most influential and exciting directors. Furthermore I have so much confidence in him and his superb company that we’re planning to programme another piece of theirs next year.”

On the basis of what I saw yesterday, that confidence is certainly well placed, and I’m glad my own theatrical curiosity got the better of me and I followed her advice to attend. Just recently I blogged here about the injunctions of the International Association of Theatre Critics, who have suggested that critics are “explorers in the art of theatre” and should “welcome new ideas, forms, styles and practice.”

This is exactly the sort of show they might have been talking about, and I’m glad I went on the adventure. It turned out to be one of the theatre events of the year; but also, I fear, one of the most exclusive, since it only ran for three cycles from Friday to Sunday. I’m not sure how many people saw it in all, but my guess is that, with only the stalls occupied, it would probably have been around 600 a show, so a total of 1800. But this is one of those theatre events, too, where the impact will likely be disproportionate to the numbers who actually saw it. Behind me at the beginning were both Nick Hytner and Michael Boyd; Nick admitted to me before it even began that he wasn’t going to be able to stay for the entire show, but I ran into Boyd again as I left at the end of the evening, so he obviously did.