Absolutely ages ago I leant a book called Theatre Materials: What is theatre made of? to one of my students. I don't know who it was, but I never got it back, which is a real shame as it's no longer published and it was a brilliant book. Bugger.
It was a book that came out of a conference with the same name and each of the chapters explored the stuff that theatre is made from; whether that be a puppeteer exploring the performance qualities of household objects, the actors exploring the material of the body, a scenographer auditioning fur and lace for an opera or (my favourite) the curator of the Materials Library, freezing roses in order to smash them, dramatically, into pieces. The book's aim is to engage the reader in the performity of materials.
I thought of this when I watched As you like it at the National, when a room full of office chairs, clunky metal desks and spidery angle poise lamps, get hoisted from the ground and clunkily formed a spiralling metal knot hanging from the ceiling, representing the darkest recesses of the forest of Arden. There has been much already written about this moment, by critics, both in the press and online. Some loved it, some were sort of indifferent and some felt it represented the relentless invasion of the director and designer goose-stepping over the soul of the actor and text. Those who hated it would have had a field day on the day I was there as the transition literally trapped the actors, who were left hanging bereft from the rafters, waiting for the flooring, which was stuck below, to be manually pushed back by the technical team.
This isn't the first time this has happened to me, I once had to come back on another day to see the second half of The Tempest at the Almeida in 2000 when the hidden floor at the bottom of the huge pool that Ariel emerges from, also got stuck. I remember then, the same thing happening as at the National, a frisson of excitement, this time claps and cheers, as the stage manager walked to the front of the stage and announced that the floor was now working again, a reminder of the liveness of it all.
I don't know, maybe thats just me, maybe everyone else was pissed off.
However, gefore I talk about the Lizzie Clachan's set, I want to go back to some of the comments from those critics, firstly Michael Billington then Dominic Cavendish.
'...although the evening has its pleasures, you come out discussing the visual concept rather than the actors’ performances.'
'That, however, is typical of an evening that ultimately belongs to the director and designer. In old-fashioned productions of As You Like It, it was often said that you couldn’t see the wooed for the trees. In this instance, the cast is almost upstaged by the chairs.'
I agree with both of these statements.
The visual concept was the most memorable aspect of the show. The design said the most, it said upheaval and discomfort, it said, this transition from office to exile destroys everything that I have come to know and all before was a facade and this ugly place maybe twisted and dark but it is where I belong. A bit like when Neo rips of his matrix suckers and chooses to stay in the post apocalyptic world rather than stay in virtual fantasy. It was alive, bold and inherently theatrical.
The performances were lacking something. Rosalie Craig is captivating and was wonderful as The Light Princess, but after seeing Pippa Nixon as Rosalind at the RSC last year, Craig captured none of the vulnerability, freedom or giddy mischief that Rosalind experiences as Ganymede in the forest. Paul Chahidi's Jacques was a cliched boring grumpy old bloke, Joe Bannister's Orlando was youthful and ebullient but lacked chemistry with Rosalind, Patsy Ferran's Celia was brilliantly quirky but Phillip Arditti's Oliver was too lightweight.
Orlando Gough's music was beautifully harmonic and a magical counterbalance to the bleak stage setting, Fra Fee as Amien's voice had a lush tone and his accent gave the music a rougher folk quality. The soundscapes created by the cast hidden in the metal tangle, were suitably disorientating, although I think a few after effects could have helped them fill the space better.
What I disagree with, with regards to Billington and Cavendish, is that these misjudged performances, or actually this misjudged casting is the fault of the design. It seems perverse to me, that we would say, the acting was lacklustre, therefore I blame the design because it was imaginative and it made more of an impact upon me than the actors, goddamit it!
In Complicite's The Three lives of Lucie Cabrol, two planks of wood performed a scene of intense love making in the woods, in Improbable's Satyagraha, kings were made out of paper, in Paris, protests against climate change were made by thousands of shoes. Material need not be soulless, we shouldn't be afraid to let them perform and they shouldn't always be made the scapegoat when the acting goes wrong.
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