A Dream Play at Hull Truck

Hull College's staging of Caryl Churchill's adaptation of Strindberg's A Dream Play asks the question: Where is Paradise? It's certainly not in a Churchill play. And definitely not this one.

In her defence – and it's not often I defend Caryl Churchill – it's not all her fault. The original material is from one August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright (with a fragile grip on reality at the best of times) who was leaving behind his Naturalism phase and heading into his Expressionist phase (via a near-death experience) when he wrote it – basing it around the patterns of, you guessed it, a dream (clue's in the name). That explains rather a lot about A Dream Play. Once you put it through the filter of Churchill – who has an apparent objection to giving her characters anything resembling a context, and here rejects character continuity – and hand it to a young company in a studio space...well, the poor play didn't stand a chance.

This production has failed in overcoming the problems with staging this script – in which (apparently) Agnes the Angel comes down to Earth to find out what it's like being a human (see also: The Bible (Feminist version)) – because they try to make it naturalistic. In the black box, the scenes that they play so straightly all appear in the same place, and there's no sense of movement or of change. But change is crucial to Agnes journey through the nature of humanity; the very essence of (what I shall optimistically call) the story is that she goes from a state of ignorance to knowing all about being human...poor girl.

A poor girl she is, indeed. Agnes' various discoveries – shown in hodgepodge of scenes which are difficult to link together in the mind – lead her to despair of all human life. Considering what she sees, that's no surprise. But if what she sees were somehow to be shown differently... Strindberg wrote the original as a piece of Expressionism, while he was turning his back on all he'd done before, ie. Naturalism. With Churchill thrown into the mix as well, it'd be no bad thing to throw any attempt at Naturalistic staging out of the window and give full vent to any Expressionist – even Absurdist – ideas. It's a script that lends itself to playing with images and concepts, not words and characters.

The main message of Churchill's script – one oft repeated – seems to be: Life is pretty dire, and everyone has problems. Thanks for that pearl, Caryl, thanks...

'Confessions of a City Supporter' at Hull Truck

Alan Plater's play Confessions of a City Supporter is centred around the story of one man's life like the core that an apple grows around.


As the title implies, Confessions... plays in the city of Hull, chosen as the home of Hull Truck Theatre Company in 1972 because it seemed the least likely place in the Universe to base an experimental theatre company. Also because it was cheap. The Company toured for a few years – not having a permanent venue – until settling in a blue shed on Spring Street, their iconic venue opposite the city's morgue. It was the same year that John Godber joined the Company.


All that moving around between 1972-83 probably gave the Company a good feel for the community there were working in, as – presumably – will the large number of locals that they employ. Nowhere is that community spirit felt more than in Hull Truck's current brochure. A quick flick through it reveals the rather large number of local influences in the first season at the shiny new venue on Ferensway. First Hull Trains, Hull CVS and Hull City Council each get their logos plastered onto advertising for a show. Coming up on the Main Stage are the Youth Theatre's Our Day Out, and a play about Hull's recent flooding, while local Hull College students perform (A Dream Play) this week in the Studio, and both the Humber Mouth Literature Festival and Hull Jazz Festival will have events hosted at the Truck in Summer. The Education/Outreach Department has been renamed Inter@ct (see what they did there?) and there's a whole page on conference options in the theatre.


Then, there's Confessions... itself, which is sponsored by Premiership side Hull City AFC, and is swamped in the community it takes such pains to play to. Audience members turn up to this Help Group show in football strips of varying ages, while one fan tells them about his family's experiences of supporting City (well, the male line's experiences; the women just seem to sit around and give birth every once in a while). It's a play very much at home in its Hull setting, with plenty of opportunity for digs at Grimsby, Leeds or Doncaster (even one at the frankly wonderful Wolverhampton), and isn't ashamed to 'wallow in failure', as one character has it. In fact, failure is almost a communal activity in this case, after all, audience members confess to being City supporters, and are then reassured that there's no shame in that. You see, City have always been cheated – we're told, with ever such faint echoes of other put-upon peoples, like the ever-suffering Irish or the wandering Jews – through the century or so on display here. In fact, the one big victory is celebrated in an overly long bit of singing – they have to make a song-and-dance of what they've got, bless them.


But, alas, there's a lie at the heart of Confessions..., a terrible, self-deceiving lie. It's not for the neglected partners at all. We're told that, at the start – they say there's no point talking to the fans, because they already understand the heartache...no, the play is for the partners who've been neglected down the ages. Thing is, if that were the case, surely those partners would get more stage time than the fans? Not so. This is all about the fans, and about the (male) community in Hull getting behind their team. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a lie, all the same.


Oh, and it doesn't grow out of the story of one man's life. The core is a line of four fathers in the same family.