Hello everyone!
It feels like Theatre in the UK is ending on a low, everything feels really draining and trying to stay enthusiastic in an industry that doesn’t uphold the rights of it’s workers and, keeps staging anti-semetic signifiers even when the dust is apparently settling on a previous case is seemingly an impossible task and to top it off, as I’m writing this, a known transphobic choreographer is sucsefully raising money to defend themselves against accusations. Around each corner, it seems like the theatre instituions are shitting the bed at any given oppurtunity and upholding the worst parts of the sector
I think thats why I’ve found it a struggle to whip up the excitment to talk enthusiatically about shows I’ve seen this year. It feels a bit pointless? yeah theatre can be good but the structures it’s being produced and created in seem so careless and brutal to the people who work in them but allow those with power to completly neglect any sense of responsibility.
This isn’t even a UK theatre specific thing either. There’s so many cases. These are in public knowledge but it doesn’t feel like much is changing or if anything will change. Salmoe Wagaine’s excellent post on theatre’s current flop era gets at the core of this.
BUT I wanted to share some shows I enjoyed this year becuase I love a good list and I want people to hear about some shows that they may have missed. These are a mixture of some I saw streamed and some I saw IRL. There’s a nice mixture of huge giant big boy shows to some main stage debuts to small scale fringe work. If you like the sound of any of these shows please do check out the artists who made them and see what they’re working on next!
Before we start, more so than anything this year, the shows I admired the most were the ones that taught me how to be a better artist or showed me alternative ways to create theatre. I’m really grateful for this and I’m taking what I’ve learnt from these shows and seeing how my practice can borrow some of these methods. I love that, seeing shows and feeling like your a better artist just for seeing it. Bliss.
The list below is in no order
Enjoy
seen as a stream hosted by Ballhaus Ost
Anja’s Grandmother has gone missing. In an attempt to find her, she makes a video seeking to find answers and to ask her to come back home. She asks the rest of the family to help, staging reenactments of stories told by family members and interviewing them about their memories of Anja’s Grandmother. This film adapation of a canceled theatre production starts with Friederike’s, Anja’s grandmother, note she left for the family
„Let there be a man,
let there be a woman,
let there be the longing for unconditional love
and the desire for the child
who has the mission to complete this love.
Let there be a house
let there be the truth.”
My heart grew with this show. Alongide Anja, you learn about how family structures and the patriarchy can betray the love and ideologies held by those you are connected to. How can you challenge the concepts of a nuculear family whilst wanting to care for a child and be a mother? Are those labels helfpul in mainiting a healthy relationship? What do those labels offer in holding and withdrawing power structures? I never really thought too much about the structures of families and what alternatives there could be, the show brought these discussions in a way that felt considered and cared for without alienating it’s audience. Anja asking the rest of her family to no longer refer to her as a daughter or grand daughter but to only refer to her as Anja and as an equal made me interrogate my beliefs around the family unit and I don’t think I ever had that before. The family as a construct is complex and messy but this show approached it in a sweet and personal way that makes it’s discussions feel even more urgent.
I loved this show. I want it to be seen by a lot of audiences in the UK.
Landscape ( 1989 ) by Emergency Chorus
seen as a stream hosted by Bedales
Ben and Clara are good friends and I’m well aware that my relationship to them impacted my viewing of this show.
There’s a section where they both slowly walk backwards, waving to the audience and say goodbye, see you later, adios…etc. This happens for about 5 minutes. As soon as this images settles I burst into tears. I’m crying becuase I miss my friends and there is a horror in seeing your friends wave goodbye, especially when you don’t know when or if you’ll see them again. Then it hits me, this is the sort of relationship I should have with the land. I know, a bit tenious as a link. All the images before and after this specific moment lead me more to that thinking, I don’t believe if I watched that section on it’s own then I’d have the same thought process. But you see the images Ben and Clara create, cooking mushrooms, dancing mushrooms, laying on the floor and breathing with the space and Landscapes gives you the space to build up your own ideas. It gives you space to breath and imagine, what theatres are for.
The idea of two friends walking off into a blackout and saying goodbye, potentially never to return. I never want that to happen. I never want to see The End Of It All. I don’t want to see destruction or the climax of the climate catastrophe and one of the reasons for that is that I don’t want to see my friends walk off into a blackout saying goodbye, potentially never to return.
If i’m programming a little european theatre festival of theatre companies who I think are making the most exciting work. CMD+C and Emergency Chorus would be the two names who’d be first on my list.
I Am From Reykjavik by Sonia Hughes
seen IRL as part of LIFT Festival
I caught the end of this piece and I was kind of gutted. Sonia, with the help of some audience members, was packing down the shed she had built. It was all very practicle, can you pass me that, can someone do this, that sort of thing. Even though I hadn’t seen the piece I wanted to stay. I was on my own in London and it was nice to just chat with a couple of people. I asked about other showings and was handed a flyer that had the shows copy on it.
“So in 1965 my mum and dad book a holiday to the Isle of Wight; my mum’s pregnant with me. Dad gets a bit wary and writes to the hotel saying that we’re coloured and would it cause any problems as they don’t want to travel all that way, what with my mum’s condition, to be turned away.
The hotel writes back cancelling the reservation. This time, I’m just rocking up. I’m bringing my own house and my own teacups. You’re welcome to come help me build my shack and take tea with me, but I’m coming whether you like it or not.”
– Sonia Hughes
By the time I finish reading the shed has been taken down and a few of the production team and Sonia are having a chat, finisalising the last things for the day in preperation for the next install. I look to the floor and I see this
The imprint of Sonia’s Shed on the grass.
I hadn’t needed to see the piece. This image spoke the ideas of the instaltion so clearly and powerfully. I’ve been obbsesed with this since I saw it and how this one image just blew me away and how succesfull it was as an art work. Like, it was so succient and striking. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I think this was the most affecting art work I’d seen all year.
Dammed be The Traitor of His Homeland! by Oliver Frljić
seen as a stream hosted by the Mladinsko
I had never heard of Oliver Frljić until this year. I saw this show on a whim and a suggestion from an Exeunt review and a desire to see work from countries I’ve never seen shows from. It was one of the best last minute decsions I made.
I saw this and I think it should be the blueprint to artists reflecting and disceting the politics of their home country. A murky show that played with the contradcitions of art and freedom. About what we can,should, and will never say. It feels like its not affraid to be right, to allow contrainian opposition to see what makes us human. Its a show full of condraction but in presenting us with these contradictions it shows the artists on the stage to be truly human. It a show to agree and disagree with. At the end of the show, the cast spend about 10 minutes discussing a dispute in the rehersal room. One of the actors refused to sing and dance to a song that had assocations with far right politics, some of the cast supported the decision whilst others didn’t. It felt like dynamite in it’s honesty.
I wonder what Oliver Frljić would make of British theatre and what it would be like if he made a show with a gorup of performers in the UK and what it’d be like to sit in that room and see a fuse slowly make its way towards a barrell of gunpowder.
seen as a stream hosted by TR Warszawa
There’s moments in theatre where your watching an image unfold in front of you and your brain just screams “fuck yeah, theatre”. The cup of blood in Secret Theatre’s Woyzeck, strangers falling into the arms of other strangers in 600 Highwaymen’s The Record, Eliza Douglas shredding on a gutair whilst a bunch of normcore zombies stand in completele stillness in Anne Ihmof’s Faust are a few that come to mind for me. Moments like this make you realise what theatre is for.
Time to add one more to the list
There’s a section in Stream where Narcissus, cast perfectly as the emo teenage boyfriend your mum hated as he sprouts the virtues of reading the entirity of Gravity’s Rainbow, tells us of how he was gunned down. As he’s doing this, Epione stands alongside him, dampening his skin with a wet flannel, enquiring about the full details of the event. The futher into the story, the more life drains out of Narcissus. Epione starts placing transferable tattos onto his wet skin. The tattos are of bloodied gun wounds. Each tattoo that his placed on his chest, his stomach and arm is another puncture, life leaking out of him.
Watching this made me lose my mind. Stream used a lot of Gen Z aetethics in a way that felt genuine, retro 90’s clothes that millenials always say “my mum dressed me in that was i was a kid” every time a student walks by, using instagram live as a diary and in this image based language, I feel like transferable tattoo’s fit into world perfectly and they’re used in such a violent, beautiful image and I can’t shake it.
Watching this was seeing an innovative director curating brutal images in the most dramaturgical satifying way possible.
fuck yeah, theatre
Civilisation by Jaz Woodcock Stewart & Morgann Runacre-Temple
seen irl at HOME and NDT
What hasn’t been said about Civilisation? I don’t think a piece of independently produced theatre has rocked the british theatre scene as much as this? It deserves all it’s plaudits and I can’t wait to see what Jaz does next.
The bop it scene was the most alive thing I’ve seen theatre in years.
There’s also a bit where Sophie Steer is wearing loads of clothes and then just stops and it felt like the theatre counterpoint to this scene from I Think You Should Leave
and it made both of these scenes even sadder when my mind jumped to that parallel.
The pure theatrical craft that went into this production is sheer and I can’t think of anyone doing it better in the UK than Jaz. I hope theatre insitutions give her the support she deserves to develop her practice so she can reach dizzier heights.
I love this show and I’ve talked a lot about it before but I just wanted to share my love for it again. Yes. More of this sort of thing.
seen as a stream but I can’t remeber where…sorry
Love letters to theatre can sometimes suck. They can come across as fairly self indulgent and tends to be made by the person with the most power in the space, as the foh staff watch on with a bitter taste in the mouth as the same person recently put them on zero hour contracts.
Soporo was made with love of it’s theatre workers. The prompter takes centre stage, whispering stage directions and text to the actors on stage and tells the story of her theatre and her artistic director, an important statment of the piece. The story of a theatre building that has seen drama on stage reflected to the relationships in the offices, cafe and dressing rooms rarely seen by its audience.
By placing the theatres most dedicated servant on stage in such a beautoful poetic way made me realise that when artists talk about the theatre, 9 times out of 10 they don’t mean it’s workers and how this conversation feels like it missing. Theatre is nothing without it’s workforce and during a time where theatre’s are treating their staff poorly, seeing this love letter felt like the right kind of shift, a realisaiton that alongside the bricks and mortar, those who greet you when you pick up your tickets, those who show you to your seat, those who are in blacks shifting scenes and the person hiding in the shadows giving prompts are the foundation to any theatre and they should be respected in equally romantic ways we revere our favourite directors or actors.
So that’s my list! If anyone wants to give me millions of pounds to produce a arts festival where these shows play alongide each other then you can paypal me.
If you enjoyed etude this year then please tell your friends to subscribe and share this post!
Thanks to those who have supported etude this year and I can’t wait to share what I have planned for next year! It’s going to feel a bit different but I hope you enjoy!
Until next year
Josh x