The Pillowman at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

You know, high art and culture are actually the most dangerous and subversive things in modern society. All of this art malarkey seems just as likely to inspire virtue, charity etc. in a person as it does hatred and violence.

A few months ago, a student at my University declared in print that World of Warcraft is notorious for turning players into social pariahs and slovenly wretches – but that's not the only negative effect has on its viewers. More frequently shoot-'em-up games that allow the player to inhabit a violent persona have been linked to an increase in violent crime (as has Hip-Hop, with its glorification of gang turf and guns, cf. In Loving Memory).

In The Pillowman, the idea is that the high artform of the short story is responsible for encouraging horrific crimes. That same student claimed that chess had resulted in more 20th-century deaths than any computer game – which goes to show that you shouldn't believe everything you read. Unfortunately, some people are more susceptible than others to the malign power of art and literature.

It's a malign power that disguises itself in a softer guise (ie. a man made of pillows); appearances are deeply deceptive in this totalitarian world. For a play so obsessed with story-telling (cf. Bad House), there is a surprisingly high number of untrustworthy narrators on display. It's not just the Police that are untrustworthy, but also the supposedly innocent and those that haven't done anything they think is wrong (let's be honest, not a one of them is really innocent).

Martin McDonagh's play might over-state art's prosecution case by making the victim of art's influence a mentally-handicapped person, but James Gamage's sensitive performance keeps this plausible. Undeniably, the dependence Gamage's character has on his brother invests an even heavier moral burden on Chris Cains' Katurian – the artist whose graphic and gruesome words instigate crime, and the brother who must protect and nurture his mentally-handicapped sibling. He is more responsible than most artists accused of inspiring crime, and his plight is so much more interesting for that.

McDonagh's richly dark comic play is a terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian state that refuses to afford rights to its citizens. Its citizens have a twisted set of morals – a world where it's okay for parents to torture their children for years without their other children noticing, and for that to be reflected in the short stories written by the survivors.

Tell Tale at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

Children play. They like to play. The inner child. The nine-year old expressed in a poetic limbo space before our eyes. In our minds.

Child's play is at the heart of Hull Uni's Tell Tale – the stage is filled with innocent naifs, who have just discovered the space they're in. At the same time as us. Or has the space discovered them? Either way, Sarah Davies' cast then give guided tours for some of the audience – those that brave the parachute game – around the space they themselves have only just discovered.
Each of these children have tales to tell – spot the title. Why: no one knows. Where: no one knows. But they're too adult, too knowledgeable, too worldy-wise, to be children.

They tell stories about animals. About butterflies and kangaroos, about hedgehogs and tortoises, about leopards and moths. They let dingoes loose in the daring dark, and their women wash in the wettest waters of the Wollgongilong River. Their butterflies perch on the fingers of kings. For no readily-apparent reason, they serve squash and biscuits. Don't ask why; your inner child doesn't. It's a children's party for all of the children in the theatre – bring your inner child if you want an invitation.

These children wander and wonder. The audience wonder. They have a chance to wander. Questions are asked: answers remain hidden somewhere off-stage – in some metaphysical, existential game of hide-and-seek. The children never dwell on a question; five more queue in the wings. Neither should you. Let your wonder wander.

It's about saying 'yes' to new questions and ideas. Giving free reign to that inner child.

Phaedra's Love at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

The state of British society is appalling. There are arrogant, ignorant chavs at the bottom and repulsive, depraved aristocrats at the top – and we'll all be better off without them.

This is a problem exposed in Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love, where it is picked at like an angry scab. At the heart is the spoilt brat of a prince, Hippolytus. You may have seen messier living rooms in student houses (I have), but you've probably not met someone quite so unpleasantly repellent as this slob. Yet women – and men – still want him! What is there attractive about him? Sure, he's not physically unattractive, but it's hard to see anything likeable. Rupert Lazarus gives the arrogant sneer and charisma needed for such a wastrel with an assured charm – damn him. His Hippolytus is almost a sympathetic character, and it's that which makes the play hang together.

What of that play? Phaedra's Love is based on a Greek Tragedy which takes Hippolytus as its main character, but in Kane's hands it becomes a brutal attack firstly on medical science and then on religion. The shrinks are as flawed as their patients, incapable of giving any help beyond saying that Hippolytus needs to lose weight. Not helpful in the slightest. And as for religion! Kane's Hippolytus is a violently, self-righteously Atheist in a world that seems utterly devoid of any divinity. The Catholic Church – seen in Jamie Askill's Priest – is yet another institution that lets down those most in need of it. Kane shows both medical science and religion to be a disgrace and a let-down.

Racheal Shaw's giggly Phaedra burns on a pyre along with any shred of decency in the world, and the firestorm caused is only the beginning of the end. While Edmund Jones' Theseus tears himself apart in grief, the world goes to Hell and will never come back.

But that gang of chavs at the doors when the audience enters prove that the world is already in a dire state. These floatsam place themselves inside the audience before they pour their filthy presences onto the stage and form the mob at the climax. Their rage at so public a criminal is palpable and has been in some form for much of the play. While the mob is undeniably necessary, it might not need to be chavs – nor do they need to come amongst the audience. They personify the play's rage with unnerving power in the final moments, so much so that I was willing them to their unspeakable acts of violence. So well done to them, the horrible little scumbags.

Doesn't it just make you mad?

Our Country's Good at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

What's the best way to deal with a person who steals a loaf of bread to feed their family?

If you gave 'hanging' as an answer, you'd be right. Well, according to the legal system established within the British colony of New South Wales in Timberlake Wertenberger's Our Country's Good. It may seem a harsh penalty, but we're dealing with a colony of the British Empire peopled largely by convicts and their soldier guards, and the man enforcing the laws is a General.

He's torn between setting a harsh example in defence of the British laws made in a faraway and his sympathy for the human suffering he sees in the people he governs. In fact, it's deeper than that; many of the play's debates aren't simply about capital punishment. They're about a much bigger debate that relates not only the British colonists/convicts, but also to the native peoples whose voice has no expression in the text though they are physically present in this production's many interludes. The debate Wertenbaker returns to again and again is that between cultivating and civilising (thus bettering) mankind or accepting that mankind will fail, make mistakes and never be corrected. It's a debate still relevant today, when stories about Jon Venables crop up: should we be rehabilitating law-breakers or punishing them? Is it worth elevating such people (criminals, colonised peoples) knowing that their nature is not suited to the ideal of mainstream Europe, and their fall from it is almost inevitable?

Naturally, there's no easy answer to those questions. Nor is there one that applies to all (not even most) cases, and Wertenbaker never pretends such an answer exists. Her play is rather more certain about the means of elevating the criminals or colonised peoples: art. Specifically drama, unsurprising in a dramatist, and particularly relevant to those of us here at NSDF intending to learn about drama. So there are links between the cast of the play-within-a-play of OCG and the audience of OCG; we are people expected to learn, mature and grow as individuals through the practice and application of drama as an artform and agent of culture.

Wertenbaker's ending leaves her audience guessing. We've no idea how the play-within-a-play is received, after its painful and shaky rehearsals. In a way, it leaves the metaphorical ball very much in our court – we're the ones that must take the learning from drama and culture then run with it into the future, in a way that we don't get to see the fictional cast doing. It's our move.

Guidelines for Measures to Cope at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

What happens when science meets performance – as with any clash of titans – is that one or both of them must sacrifice something to the other. After the tender and beautiful opening minute of Guidelines for Measures to Cope, it becomes clear that science has gained the upper hand.

In a massive information overload, a textbook definition of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is given via voiceover – no doubt interesting and informative in itself, especially considering the disorder's low profile in the UK. What BDD boils down to – and do take note, as this is is what Guidelines... is all about – is a disorder that makes (mainly young) people think their bodies look different to the way they actually are – too fat, too small, wrong colour, say. Think of all the time you spend in getting ready to go out and checking your appearance in shop or car windows – imagine having to do that all the time because had no choice. BDD can be like that, without the fun, forever. There are more sufferers than you might think, and it's a very private, introvert disorder that rarely gets reported.

If anyone missed the details of the definition (they probably did), then the cast helpfully chalk notes up on the wall as they go. Like lecture notes, these might mean something in the immediate aftermath of being written, but won't do so later. Every now and then they mark up individual rules HDD sufferers have adopted in order to cope – this is the individual, human story behind the condition if ever you want one. But in some cases, a straightforward narrative isn't strictly necessary (maybe definitive plotlines are over-rated?) and it's interesting that other shows this year also have plots that refuse to be categorical yet this is considered part of their charm.

Avoiding emphasis on a single character, the cast spend the rest of the show enacting and dramatising – in verbatim form – the condition itself. Their stories and monologues of confession are real people's words and between them build a portrait of BDD, not of individual sufferers. But the piece is intended as an educational device, and as such its concern is to teach and educate, to raise our awareness of BDD in the world. In pursuit of that end, it can sometimes be helpful to think in terms of individual faces and stories (an anonymous mass of Holocaust victims tends to arouse far less sympathy than individual Anne Frank – bigger scale, but you get my point) – but Electric Shadows don't worry too much about that.

Instead they layer up experiences of BDD in a non-linear fashion, to demonstrate and dramatise that definition they had at the start. They don't dramatise a character, which could become implausible and suffer inhuman levels of stress, but dramatise instead the condition – as such, the piece speaks to each of us about an experience broader than ourselves.

Bad House at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

In somewhere fairly unpleasant not too far from here, there's a disreputable bar called the Bawd House (or maybe the Bad House). It's a place where the stained walls are soaked in grim stories to set the teeth on edge and turn the stomach.

Of course you're more than welcome to visit this Bawd House – assuming it's still standing – and partake of its dubious delights...good ale (apparently), spit in the tankards and a leery, one-eyed Landlord who regales his assembled customers with provincial fairy tales.

Tom Gill is that Landlord, and he relishes his role, the vowels and gruesome details rolling round his mouth and out into open, echoey space before him. Beside him, alternately leering and lowering outwards, are his regular chorus of customers – somehow, they're also his audience, yet are more informed than us about the dark history of this place.

And what a history. Ravenous, glutting crows devastating farmland until supernatural forces intervene; a wealthy orphan pursued by (and pursuing) lusty young suitors-turned-grave-robbers beyond death, and finally a series of unexplained child vanishings culminating in a tense chase through churchyards. The Bawd House's pivotal role in this history underlines its distinctly unsavoury character, being the point at which the Landlord's trio of tales come full circle.

The last is probably the strongest, especially as the cast's storytelling enters a whole new dimension. Strong as Tom Gill's monologue performance is, the story-telling premise really takes off when the other cast members are allowed a voice too and the pace rattles along twice as fast. Their new tight focus on a solitary spot, coupled with the refreshing movement around it, gives a whole new level of tension to Bad House.

But ultimately, though it may scare, Bad House is about telling stories. They are tales that inspire fear and then purge it with the relief and reassurance that are – at the end of the day – just stories.

Angel at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

I don't use the term 'mind-fuck' lightly. Certainly not this time, anyway, considering that DeMontford University's Angel won't necessarily leave you reeling.

The five performers give an ostentatious triumph for the theatre approach that doesn't rely upon (or even need) a narrative. You remember the folk (well, Anthony Mamos) who wrote in Monday's NOFF that: 'I don't like stories'.

So now we can behold the results of the artistic policy that is so opposed to narrative. And how oppositional it is. Watch as Angel takes apart many of the rules associated with theatre. Their space, divided vertically by string and horizontally by tape, is a crazy paving web of controlled anarchy – populated by figures that I'd like to relate to board games and games of chance. I'd like to, but I'm not convinced.

What we get presented with appears to be a 3D exploration of the effect of music on individuals. A certain operatic aria creates a frenetic lucidity prompting the declaration from the angel-man that he keeps going around in circles. Work-out music gets him onto the exercise bike, other styles get him and his companions typing or applauding. It's not strictly about a specific man; it seems to be more a means of conveying the relationship between human behaviour and music. Alas, this is something that needs experiencing (hearing and seeing) to be full grasped.

At the centre is Mamos himself – the man who dresses as an angel. And why not? Why shouldn't a man be free to dress and express himself as he likes? Within reason, of course – but if he's not hurting anyone else, then he can do as he likes. And frankly, his outfit is almost as entertaining as it is disturbing. Though it's the muscular tics that cause the disturbing effect.

The non-linear approach of Angel is brought brazenly to the fore when, after hopelessly flicking through a gigantic book, a character announces that 'it's no story, this, here' and kills the lights. So any attempt to impose meaning on this eclectic piece via plotline is confounded (no doubt to the delight of Mamos' anti-plot school of thought). The irony is that the phrase is placed at the closing of the piece, and so is bound to be seen as a conclusion or definitive statement by those trying to impose a story structure.

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.

Alice in Wonderland

It was once just the dream of design students in Liverpool, but now – after much-hyped delay – Tim Burton's film version of Alice in Wonderland has finally reached UK cinemas.

At the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts a few years ago, I saw the results of work by design students imagining what would happen if Tim Burton directed an adaptation of this classic Victorian tale. Naturally, the real thing is much more overstated and far zanier. This is Tim Burton, after all. Both Wonderland and the Victorian world which contrasts with it take flamboyance very seriously.

But let's be clear early on – Linda Woolverton's screenplay is far from faithful to the book's storyline (although certain things remain, like the drink and cake that make Alice change size, and the infamous white rabbit), and never pretends to be. From the outset, we have Alice as a young girl troubled by nightmares involving creatures vaguely recognisable from Lewis Carroll's story, but that soon changes. We zip forwards thirteen years to be shown the nineteen-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) subject to the strictures of a Victorian society that insists she conform. Like so many teenagers after her, she refuses to do so, and the early hints of her mental instability (hallucinations?) come to the fore as she runs away from the pressure of an unwelcome proposal.

So, not a dream on a pleasant summer's day then. It's also much darker than the 1951 cartoon film, which established Disney's tradition (unrelated to Carroll's work) of a blonde Alice in a blue dress. Thank goodness for that, as Burton gives a much deeper, much more troubled Wonderland than earlier versions.

Burton's film may have departed from the letter of Carroll's book, but not the spirit. What has always made Alice in Wonderland so tricky to classify as a children's book is that it is so subversive. For example, Alice takes on trust the bottle marked 'Drink Me'...surely a contradiction of any parent's instruction to their child should they find a strange bottle of liquid. She takes and eats mushrooms from a caterpillar (a stranger!) who is quite clearly on drugs and not in his right mind. She rebels against the authority in Wonderland. Yet she is a children's heroine. Burton might not stick to that outline, but he does allow some very subversive stuff to creep in. His Alice is a visionary in a society of pragmatists. Tied down by other people's expectations (an audience for when Hamish (Leo Bill) proposes?), she runs away into a dream land of her own making. Like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, that dream world helps her make decisions about the real world. By the end, she – not unlike Alan Rickman's Caterpillar – has metamorphosed into an independent, determined young woman.

In fact, this radically departs from the original text, not only in its conflation of Alice in Wonderland with its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. With the introduction of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) as a rival to the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and a plot taken from Carroll's poem The Jabberwocky (written as part of the Wonderland books), Burton turns this into much more of an epic film. It suddenly becomes about usurping and rightful queens, champions and monsters, insanity and bravery. That may not be a bad thing, but it doesn't quite chime with what Carroll wrote.

However – in a way that feels classically Burton, and far from classically Victorian – Burton doesn't allow us an easy good vs. evil. His White Queen is just as dubious ruler as her sister, with personal loyalty based on apparent hypnosis and a willingness to place her own pacifist vows above the lives of her followers. She's not quite likeable, despite her mixture of Aslan with the Elves of Lothlorien, never mind the fact that she doesn't deny the Red Queen's claim of being the eldest of the sisters (therefore the rightful queen).

Unfortunately, a lot of visual eccentricity has gone into this film at the expense of the verbal fun Carroll had within his text. That seems to be the greatest loss going over to the big screen. That isn't to say that humour is lacking – a lot of the visual stuff is good and funny. Burton succeeds in creating visually striking and endearing characters (especially Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter, who can never quite decide if he's Scottish or not, and Bonham Carter is wonderful).

This has the cinematic quality and hallmarks of Burton, but is also a film that has learnt from the examples of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia films. The ending has become a battle of good and evil, finally decided by a single, unwilling hero facing a monster.