Soft Target? Preview piece for Noises Off 2011

If you look at the first page of your Festival program, you'll find a welcoming note from the Festival's patron Sir Alan Ayckbourn, former Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (by the train station, don't worry, you'll get to know it).

As well as welcoming us all to Scarborough for the week, he tells us that "publicly funded theatre is in crisis." He says this is because "inevitably the arts are a soft target" in times of financial cutbacks.

In a way he's got a point; it's easy to decide that the arts have limited practical value when you're struggling to fund the nation's schools, hospitals and defence. I'm not going to go back over the arguments about the arts being more than the sum of their parts, and a value greater than its up-front cost. At a National Student Drama Festival, rehearsing those arguments would (I hope) be preaching to the choir. (Anyway, Sir Alan goes through some of the points in his welcome - go read it).

But is Sir Alan in danger of writing off the arts as unable to defend themselves? Is he right to say that they (and by extension the artists) are undefended? Are our artists push-overs, so reliant on the dripfeeding of public subsidy that they'll all wither away once that invigorating nectar is withdrawn? Are we really Samson once Deliah had cut his hair off ?

If anything, the arts is the area of society that is most able to speak up for itself. We're the ones with the public stage to speak from (literally, in the case of theatre organisations). The Southwark Playhouse's Theatre Uncut performances have demonstrated that theatre - even if not the rest of the arts world - can become organised in anti-cuts activity that raises our voices in opposition.

Recently, Alexander Wright from Belt Up Theatre (NSDF selected company in 2008, NSDF visiting artists 2010) wrote a blog in which he says that "The very act of [...] putting on a show like The Beggar's Opera [...] is for me, an act of protest" - he wants the show to say: ''Look at what we are doing. We are young and able to do this because all the people around us have made it possible. And you, Mr Cameron, and you, Mr Clegg, are going to slowly burn us to the ground.

Well, if you do, we're are going to go down kicking and screaming and making a bloody big fuss."

That's not an arts scene withering away when the tap of the public funding is turned off. Wright says that it will be "very, very sad" if spending cuts kill off upcoming artists. He's right, but spending cuts will be so much more damaging if we as artists allow that attitude of "it's very sad" to take hold.

I want to see young theatre companies, young dance companies, young artists doing more than bemoaning their undersubsidised fate. Let's not see the whole "ConDem" thing as a problem, but as an opportunity. Now is the time for young companies to show off their great strengths: imagination, adaptability, resilience, flexibility, vigour.

Reduced funding should make us try harder for other types of funding, and should force us to

use our imaginations for that as well as in our art. Keep costs down (easier for us than for bigger, older organisations) and stay nimble financially We have something to make us angry (instead of sad, please), something to respond to, something to fire us up - and we've got the imaginative and artistic firepower to say something about it.

I agree when Sir Alan says that "theatre is important" and perhaps I even agree when he says "publicly funded theatre is in crisis" - but he shouldn't write off the arts as defenceless quite so easily.

4 Bar and Rising at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

The poor common man at the centre of 4 Bar and Rising is under a lot of pressure: mounting paperwork and networks of dependency have reduced him to a human pinball. The boiler in my house rarely gets up to one bar, and that heats the house fine – these days it's too much. So I dread to think what four bars must be like. This man's plight, as he is pinged around the stage while trying to shrug off the burdens of his world, is one that taps into the essence of modern life. It speaks to each of us living in a society with dress codes and a reliance on exam results as a means of determining worth.

4 Bar... speaks most strongly against the society it finds itself in when Adrian Spring finds himself forced to bear with him a wad of important papers, which between them determine and rigidly classify his life. His birth certificate, exam results, CV, marriage and divorce certificates and all that tiresome bureaucracy that has turned him into the dazed, confused and pressured individual he is. They are all things expressing an obligation on his part (even that of registering his birth) – yet not one demonstrates any benefit he gains, like a wage or food. Most explicitly, a final – unidentified – piece of paper is dangled in front of him and placed just out of his reach. As he strains against the elasticated rope holding him back, struggling to keep hold of the other papers (ie. his entire life, in this society's value-structure), desperate to reach the piece of paper (clearly representing the wages/benefits for the generic proletariat) denied to him, the tension builds and the anti-capitalist allegory becomes very clear. Then the tension snaps – and of course the working man had been denied his rights.

His final act is a liberation not only of mind and body but of the individual from the strictures of a capitalist society that categorises and codifies its citizens amid swathes of bureaucracy.
Alternatively, it may be about something entirely different. To be honest, I really wanted 4 Bar and Rising to be about weather reports. I hoped for some Met Office experts to be pointing to colourful maps of the UK as isobars swept across the Pennines and deposited buckets of rain over Scarborough. Ideally, there would be four isobars, although I don't think that means very much pressure – I'm not a weather forecaster.

There was a man who struggles to cross roads because he worries that some other people will throw sheets of paper at him. They might also tie an elastic rope to him and ping him about like a human pinball. It becomes a live essay on the dangers of bullying. But don't worry; there's a nice ending. Our dazed, confused and abused young man remembers a Christmas or birthday, when his dad gave him a skateboard (represented here by a long metal bar). It's a touching tribute to the power of interpersonal relationships, especially within families.

Actually, neither of those really works and everything I've thought about 4 Bar... has been at best incomplete and at worst flawed. It's the sort of piece that ought to be played about with in an audience's collective imagination for long after the applause dies down. There are a myriad ways of looking at it.

Each member of the cast has a clear idea of what their piece means, and appear to want each audience member to feel that too: an individual interpretation that doesn't depend on any prescribed meaning from elsewhere. So, for those of you that had a meaning worked out – however incomplete – that's great, don't worry about it matching up with any other view, least of all that held by the cast. For the rest of us, 4 Bar... raises questions about how important it is that we pin down the exact meaning of a performance.

In the end, almost any interpretation is equally as valid as another: so said cast member Sam Powell in yesterday's discussion.

National Student Drama Festival 2010

So I've spent the last week or so in Scarborough working on the editorial team of the National Student Drama Festival's magazine, Noises Off.

The magazine is an open-access affair that caters for almost any writerly whim that chances across Fest-goers' minds - though it's mainly used for reviewing the twelve shows selected from across the country and presented in Scarborough. Thrown in there as well tends to be some comment and debate about the Festival, theatre, drama and anything else that happens to get brought up, as well as jokes, poems cartoons etc etc. All good stuff.

There were twelve shows, but this year I didn't review them all; I like to think it was because I was busy being all editorial and helping other people write things and keeping an eye on what was going in to NOFF content-wise. But it's possible I just spent a lot longer than usual thinking about stuff, so missed copy deadline.

Anyway, the next few posts are the reviews I did write. There's no Overview piece this year, I just didn't have time, and anyway Robert Hewison writes one in The Sunday Times which ought to give a good view of the Festival as a whole. That's out on April 11th.

National Student Drama Festival 2009

My third NSDF, and possibly my favourite so far. That's partly because I was lucky enough to be awarded the Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award (mentioning it sounds almost unbearably arrogant, sorry).

The blog hasn't been updated lately because being in Scarborough for the Festival takes so much time (excuses). But here's an overview of NSDF09 that appeared (more or less like this) in the Festival's magazine, Noises Off:

It may be the conspicuous level of cuddly toys littering the NOFFice, or it may be the fact that Edinburgh University's The Last Yak is still on my mind, but the thought has suddenly seized me that this year's shows can be divided roughly equally into two camps: those that featured animals in some sense and those that avoided animal references almost entirely. The reasons behind favouring or avoiding animal references may have varied, but this still serves as a useful division of the shows gracing NSDF09.

As I type this, a monkey is eyeing me mockingly from the table. He's hardly one to mock, having bright blue fur, an orange face, lime green arms and red feet and ears. Freak. He's been left by the No Wonder company from Manchester, who've generously left all their cuddly toys in the NOFFice up for adoption as mascots. Mine is the smallest, ugliest one I could find. He's a bit of an outsider, being so freakish, but he still manages to maintain that cheeky grin plastered across his hideous, orange face. Which makes him a bit like Edward Franklin's character in No Wonder – the one that emerges from the wardrobe full of toy animals. Alright, so Franklin doesn't have a face that is hideous or orange, but his character is a bullied outsider, picked on because he's weedy and his dad's a bit weird. It's a play about the delusions people practice on each other and themselves – whether that's dressing up as Peter Pan or pretending that your husband will wake up from a coma. As in several other of this year's shows, there is an undercurrent of pain and violence in No Wonder; Franklin's young Luke self-harms when he can't cope with the outside world.

He's not the only one that struggles with the outside world this year; Manchester University's other entry – Herons – centres on characters struggling to escape external factors bearing down on their lives which make the eventual climax inevitable. Interestingly, Franklin crops up in this one as well, this time as a nasty thug who punishes insults with the repeated application of a glass bottle. Nice man. What Scott (Franklin) is defending with such brutality is his honour – this and a sparse set give Herons a feel of timelessness; it could almost be about any generation let down by its elders and disapproving of the upcoming generation. Simon Stephens' long, tense play wins the award for this year's most conspicuous use of animals in a title (100% animal!), though the herons are mentioned pretty infrequently in the script itself.

The absence of any actual herons in Herons is echoed in Warwick University's Elephant's Graveyard – another title to feature heavy use of an animal – but here the elephant is mentioned much more often. The thing with this elephant – Mary – is that she's actually pretty unimportant, so it's alright for her to become invisible. What matters in Elephant's Graveyard is the reaction of the ordinary people to the death of a stranger, who is also invisible. Were either of these figures to be seen, they would undoubtedly prove distracting to the overall message of this piece, which warns of the blood lust lurking in us all. Though Mary is in the title, she's not the thing to be watching for; there is a strong ensemble cast well worth watching instead of trying to imagine the elephant they're hanging badly.

The other Mary of the Festival this year is in a play bereft of animal references: the University of East Anglia's The Wake. Initially it looks as thought this is another Mary that will have to remain in our imaginations, until she pops up in the audience and turns Jonathan Brittain's shaky one-man show into a fast-paced two-hander. Like many of the shows featuring this year, it has characters onstage before the House opens though on this occasion he is invisibly lodged inside a coffin.

East Anglia's other entry – Olivia Vinall's Tub – is another show this year to have performers in place before the audience enters, and again the performer in question is invisible – this time inside the eponymous bathtub. Tub is a twenty-minute gem of a play, that leaves its audience free to make their own stories and background to a world apparently lacking in anchors.

The removal of anchors and stable points of reference are fundamental to Warwick Uni's other entry: Return to the Silence. This production – devoid of animals, if you ignore the golden retriever reference – literally disconnects its audience from normal conventions and swings them about the space in order to give some kind of impression of how delicate a thing mental health is.

Edinburgh University's production of Anthony Neilson's Normal is another show to feature a fractured and unhinged world, but this time it's liberal moral assumptions being called into question. The mental well-being of Peter Kurten (Paddy Loughman) is certainly under examination, but so is the society that produced him – much as is implicitly happening in Herons. Something Herons doesn't have is bestiality, which Kurten relishes. To continue the theme of prominent birds, Normal has a huge swan at the back of the stage, which has perhaps led to audiences making too much of the Nazi overtones in this production. What is important to Kurten is his explosive sexual desires, along with his physical appearance.

The three characters featured in the University of Hull's Never Enough also have hidden desires that bubble dangerously to the surface when they are thrown together. These desires are largely sexual – as with Kurten in Normal – but also touch on materialism, physical appearance and food. Never Enough explores all three of its characters with roughly equal stage time and a fair amount of constructive borrowing from different dance styles.

In another example of beautifully-held balance between different characters, Dartington's Vowel Play depicts four women telling stories about their lives through microphones, possibly as background dialogue for a radio play. The quirk in Joe Richards' script is that each character may use only one vowel. The joy of Joe Richards' script is the ways in which language is forced to adapt and change to accommodate new circumstances, highlighting the immense versatility (and often musicality)of the English language.

Language also forms an important feature of Giggleswick School's Sad Since Tuesday, which features angels speaking in rhyming couplets and several characters of foreign extraction with requisite accents. The chicken wings of the angels, and the chicken huts on stage (one for the band, one for Tom Coxon's angel) help shunt this into the 'Using Animal References' category that I'm using to distinguish shows this year. While showcasing huge creative potential, this show also demonstrates how important a guiding hand can be in the rehearsal process; Sad Since Tuesday wants its rough edges smoothing over. Among the strongest aspects of this production is design, which has an aesthetic pleasantry that slides it neatly alongside the film version of A Matter of Life and Death.

Another piece paying great attention to design is the final piece of the pro-animal category (and is another to feature animal references in its title): Edinburgh University's second entry, The Last Yak. Clever puppetry is combined with a confident style to pull off a pleasing animal fable. This has the most frequent use of animals out of every piece this year; almost all of the characters are jungle-dwelling beasts.

Finally, a play that doesn't strictly belong with the pro-animal group, but has an honorary mention because its set includes a dog made solely from Coca-cola cans. Blackpool College's Me and My Friend has a set littered with these cans, but sadly devoid of actual animals references. Oh well. However, as if to compensate for the lack of animals, Me and My Friend picks up the earlier theme of mental instability established by Warwick and Edinburgh Universities.
The two characters here are out in the scary real world after their release from a psychiatric institute filled with fellow nutters.

So they're a bit like the students graduating from featured Universities/schools/colleges, really. Going out into the wider world of theatre, using their experiences in the madhouse of NSDF to further their careers and lives. Good luck to them all.