Amalia Pica in Oxford: Or, a Satire on Vanity

Mollifying Inherited Pretensions

Amalia Pica’s striking For Shower Singers exhibits a number of works in the UK for the first time. Amid the seductively disparate themes and images that abound in the Argentinian-born artist’s latest offering, mockery of institutions and the otherwise earnest ambitions of the individual might be identified as her principal concerns here. Spanning various genres, from wall displays to installations, London-based Pica satirises our cautious preservation of traditional and proverbial status, implying that we construe anachronisms for legitimate emblems, historicism as a worthy arbitrator of would-be social and creative enterprises.

Red Carpet (2010), duct tape on cardboard, traverses a wooden floor in straight and curved forms. How much Pica echoes the incorrigible celebrity culture in which we are saturated, a breathless and peculiarly Western desire for fame mirrored, here, in a suitably contorted rather than logical presentation. Soberingly, Pica leaves us wondering whether hierarchic structures, aside from their Hollywood superficiality, possess any more virtue as social constructs or as instinctive moral and artistic categories. 

If contemporary art is sometimes accused of intellectualising the everyday, of imposing nuance on the manifest, then Sorry for the Metaphor #5 (2010) offers an “apology” for this, only to objectively mimic the ground for that criticism. A figure stands by a reservoir, holding a notice. A signifier has been uprooted, an instruction ignored, prescribed clarity “burdened” with ambiguity. The scene is composed of 128 A3 photocopies. Pica, purportedly sympathetic to decried meditations on the implicit, wills that our appreciation of the world is as natural and imperfect as that realm itself, not defined or governed on our behalf. She prompts those cynical about aesthetic complexity to contemplate whether they would ordinarily tolerate a primitive, ordained configuration of their own experiences, or whether we would sooner intuit, cultivate and interpret those fragmented impressions for ourselves.

Number 1 (2012), a plinth daubed in turquoise paint, attests to a disparaged classicism, the archaic, however affectionate our popular view of it, here portrayed in the most embarrassed light. A foundation has been defaced, material and principle alike defamed. Here, as elsewhere in For Shower Singers, Pica simulates a deft collision of the precious and the anarchic, questioning whether the axiomatic significance accorded to rank and to established values carries a rational or supposed wisdom.  

For Shower Singers
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street
December 14th, 2012 – February 10th, 2013.

Practicing Urban Meditation

Klein and Moriyama tell an evocative tale of two cities

ANY retrospective promising images of New York or Tokyo immediately and effortlessly excites the cultural imagination of the would-be spectator. A title featuring both cities, then, might be seen more as an event than an exhibit, offering singular aesthetic enlightenment and the inevitability both of new questions and unforeseen paradoxes. Yet even William Klein + Daido Moriyama: New York Tokyo Film Photography betrays that full metropolitan nuance, presenting as it also does shots of Paris, Moscow and Madrid.

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."

Loyalty and forbidden love over a Victorian summer

IT might be said that, for his portrayal of Michael Fitzhubert in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), little could have better prepared Dominic Guard than his title characterisation of The Go-Between. Just as Michael feels implacable duty to a blonde, ethereal muse, Miranda, Leo Colston is captivated by Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie), as he dispatches her correspondence to her lover, Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Leo, like Michael, fluctuates between reticence and obsession, prescribed inhibitions enticed by false and implausible unions.  If, then, certain of the figures in Picnic and The Go-Between are curiously parallel, then so, too, are their broader narratives - both are set in 1900, examining themes of temptation, ambivalence and forbidden desire, amid stifling conservatism and incorrigible social pride.

The seminal opening line, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there", is as much a throwaway reminiscence as an aphoristic foreground to the story of reluctance, action and regret that ensues. The film conveys both the recollections of the older Leo and the experiences of the younger, these first words variously a lyrical hypothesis and a would-be evaluation.

'Site' - The Aesthetics of Order and Chance

Mark Wallinger offers a Deleuzian meditation on form and paradox

"The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay."

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980)

ON show at the BALTIC, Gateshead, until mid-October, Site is Mark Wallinger’s first major solo exhibition in the UK for more than a decade, with four installations themed around order and chance. The Other Wall, 10000000000000000, Construction Site and MARK focus on identity, precision and randomness, echoing Nature’s capacity to spellbind with images both of aesthetic approximation and of structure.

As the centrepiece, 10000000000000000 is a scene composed of 65,536 stones on individual black and white squares. The title is the binary form of 65,536 in decimal, that figure itself the number of charts in Western geomancy, the magic art of divination – that exactitude, though, is one branch of the visual antithesis this exhibit illuminates, that of the apparent and the obscure. On the one hand, the chessboard effect denotes precision and accords definition to the stones, to their individual uniqueness and contrasts of shape, colour and texture. Amid that continuity and linearity, though, we are aware, also, of their seamlessness, their vast array making the stones indistinguishable, chance and randomness within Nature denying any one a stand-alone attraction or quality.

In The Other Wall, Wallinger follows thinkers and artists as varied as Lowry, Sartre and Pink Floyd in making a celebrity of an everyday structure. A wall of red, grey and brown bricks, each is labelled with a set of numbers in white chalk. Mirrored here, perhaps, is our tendency to imbue even the inanimate with salience, the seemingly unremarkable noted, rationalised, adapted. The Other Wall tacitly recalls Duchamp’s Fountain, with the Frenchman’s inscription ‘1917’ citing the year of its production, and, here, Wallinger’s ‘1559’, ‘1914’ and ‘1974’, as three of countless examples, moving beyond such chronology but still exciting speculation as to their purported significance – Years? Codes personal to the artist? Application of utterly arbitrary digits? The succession of numbers follows no apparent logic – ‘1415’, ‘4775’, ‘7023’, ‘6421’, and so on – but the curious specificity with which Wallinger endows each brick stresses what could just as easily be a speculation about Nature as, here, a numerical oddity – amid the apparent chance yet individuality within Nature, does there exist a method, an order, an element of determination to even the most disparate social and spatial mechanisms?

An eighty-three minute beach scene, Construction Site shows workmen erecting and dismantling scaffolding at the water's edge. The sea and the construction, as markers of the natural and the created, conjoin Nature and labour, and yet we also see them functioning independently. The men putting up the scaffolding do not stop to observe the water, an aesthetic that is curiously incidental to their work, and of which, as an audience, we are at most implicitly aware. We are not "here" to observe the lap of the wave, but the efforts of the workmen. The natural scene is not, as might stereotypically be supposed, more compelling by virtue of its beauty or tangibility, since Wallinger offers a curious juxtaposition. The ripple of the glistening water is as much a romantic cliché as it is an aesthetic taken for granted, and thus only unconsciously acknowledged by the viewer. Meanwhile, though, it is not the construction per se that is striking, but the setting for that action, a shoreline.

Therein lies orthodoxy and idiosyncrasy - we are used to seeing scaffolding, and understand its purpose, but not in so arbitrary an environment, one we associate with hedonism rather than work, passivity rather than endeavour. Despite their being fused in one continuous shot, then, order and chance are rigidly dissociated - the power of the water could impede the men's work just as its lull is purely a backdrop; at the same time, the workers are curiously oblivious to either its wonder or its threat, Wallinger having them execute their responsibilities as if they have been commissioned or that this is the traditional arena for such industry. Wallinger makes an idol of logical rigour rather than innate beauty, definition and precision emphasised over magnitude, temperament and chance.

Finally, MARK is a video presentation showing that name on a succession of walls - those of hospitals, prisons, homes, railway bridges, underpasses - different wall designs, sizes, periods, but each carrying that same inscription. "MARK" is, of course, the artist's signature, but, as a term rather than name, conjures the broader social role bound up in such domestic or public spaces - unity, compassion, punishment, servitude, destitution, and challenge. Each makes a mark on society, be it in our perception of those settings, or in their reality.

The sequence tells us much about personhood and personality. Firstly, personhood. Across the places in which "MARK" appears, those who inhabit them may experience variable levels of agency or autonomy, but are bounded by "personhood" - the status, if we are to use a standard definition, of being a person - a condition that defies social, moral or professional differences between individuals, and, in being classified as which, questions of our goodness, opinions or freedom are seemingly immaterial. If, as a term, "human being" is more concerned with the existence of the individual, rather than with any criteria or conditions that must be satisfied to "meet" that definition, then ethical and other judgements about, for instance, our conduct or cognitive well-being, may be subservient to a fundamental and all-encompassing "I".

Secondly, personality. "MARK" is etched into different points on the walls - central, to the left, right, higher and lower. Such variations reflect the differences within an essential truth, that each person has character of different moods, shades and extremities - the personalities that engage the attention, those content or seeking to be more individualistic and leftfield, those who aspire, those with a more subdued demeanour, willing to "follow the crowd". Wallinger attests to those contrasts, giving us a "MARK" who cannot help but catch the eye, one that is offset to one side of the screen, one that is more obscure, beneath our line of vision, or one who is more elevated, driven, focused but not at the heart of the action. Within the psychology of Wallinger's showcase graffiti, we detect assertiveness, modesty, and the enigmatic.

In MARK, Wallinger locates equality within wholly dissimilar worlds and circumstances, be they products of the most benign or appalling instances of chance. Families, patients, prisoners, among others - his unseen subjects might never meet, and yet each desires, acts, speaks, expresses. Pronouncements on the merits and flaws of those we connect with such communities are touchingly answerable to Wallinger's neutral yet creative eye - the "MARK" that does not make statements and suppositions, but instead removes the veil of the most confident, proud, ambivalent or anonymous social categories, to hear the voices and denote the value of those within.

A stark, inspiring and fiercely original perspective on identity, organised chaos, and the reliably erratic schemes and forms within Nature.

Eisenstein and Odessa

Power Descending

IF the Odessa Steps Massacre in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the most oft-cited, recreated and pastiched scenes in cinema, then the peerless inspiration it has provided stems as much from its raw, devastating content as from the brute timelessness of what it depicts - the struggle of people and power.

Thomas Tallis: An Experimental View

Fourteen Minutes of Fame

The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, hosts Canadian Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet, June 16^th - October 14^th 2012.

Janet Cardiff, in her exhibition The Forty-Part Motet, understands intuitively a cardinal aesthetic principle – that less is more. With a show the only material features of which are loudspeakers, positioned in a circle as they convey a pivotal Elizabethan musical work, Cardiff notes the virtues of a spartan layout that emphasises the nuances of the score over what might otherwise seem invasive ephemera. Taking as the title of her presentation the technical make-up of Thomas Tallis’ exquisite Spem in Alium (‘Hope in any Other’), Cardiff reworks a piece for eight choirs of five voices each. In doing so, she is careful to distinguish her accomplishment, as one who purely experiments with music, from one she well knows to lie compositionally with a celebrated late Tudor prodigy. He creates, she adapts, and Cardiff admirably resists the temptation to impose embellishments that would vainly seek joint attribution. Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1573) was supposedly written to mark Elizabeth I’s fortieth birthday, and Cardiff’s strikingly original perspective is as meditative as it is engaging.

Resonant in The Forty-Part Motet is the sense in which the lyrics, heard through the individual loudspeakers, create an overall continuity – each choir is separate, to be sure, and yet as we move around the circle of speakers, harmony is maintained amid otherwise distinct sets of performers. The choirs are unique, and yet from the narrative of vocals we detect something singular that is as ingeniously engineered as it is evocatively realised.

Additional to the arresting beauty of the performances, we hear, at the beginning of the recording, almost muttered conversations between members of the choirs. Far, then, from willing some "polished" rendition, Cardiff, to her credit, gives us a warts-and-all take on the action. We are privy to their chatter, afforded a glimpse of their inhibitions, nervous laughter mingling with focused preparation. Such a feature lends a curious integrity to the recording. For Cardiff, not all art must be aesthetic - it can be combined with the sounds of the everyday, the most rudimentary exchanges, with those snippets of dialogue seen to merit inclusion, rather than be cautiously deleted lest they seem crude or erroneous.

Although Cardiff's source work is a seminal and much-heard choral piece, her mode of communicating that track nonetheless makes possible a fresh interpretation and, for us, an unusual form of appreciation. In enabling observers of the exhibition to walk round, placing themselves close to the speakers and register in detail the richness and depth of the sounds, we digest the music from that much more intimate a vantage point. We are able to "interact" with the performance, freely and gradually taking in tonal structure and subtlety. That relationship with the music may not be so easily formed in an auditorium, wherein our impressions of what we hear are to some extent dictated by where we sit or stand, so Cardiff, through permitting us to "select" our viewpoint, invites us to focus on our terms as well as on her own. Such a liberty – being able to walk around, discerning a subject from different angles - when scrutinizing  a sculpture or a painting, is welcome but somehow natural and expected. With a piece of music, however, opportunity to move from one place to another, in tandem with the flow and variety of a recording, opens up more novel possibilities for study and participation.

Cardiff has Spem in Alium, a fourteen-minute piece, play in a continuous loop. As such, those entering the exhibition room coincide either with its resumption, when it is in full session, or drawing to a close. Such a format recalls the spontaneity rather than bid for precision described earlier. While an inanimate work of art might be a stationary, unchanging entity, our coming into the room either at the start or midway through the performance captures each visitor’s attention through its different temporal and stylistic moods – amid the conversations that precede the recital, when in full flow, or as the performance is drawing to a close. To that end, Cardiff offers us the sounds of the incidental, of an arresting highpoint, or the diminishing but tantalizing moments of a powerful, haunting rendition.

Here, The Forty-Part Motet returns to Newcastle for the first time since 2001, having then premiered at the Castle Keep. Its appearance at the BALTIC is especially welcome – it is a singularly compelling installation that appropriates intelligently but unselfconsciously both performance and spectatorial space, drawing us into the creative world of a Renaissance genius. An implicit awareness of Tallis’ authorial intention maintains artistic salience and authenticity without muting Cardiff’s own, deftly revisionist annotations.

Shakespearean Tragedy: The New Cultural Idiom

Hamlet, Julius Caesar and King Lear in experimental forms

“He was not of an age, but for all time”. Ben Jonson’s epitaph for Shakespeare is as prophetic as it is reflective. His corpus supplanted its own temporal boundaries, and would annotate all future literary endeavour. If, though, Jonson’s tribute is to echo in pragmatic rather than solely rhetorical terms, then interpreters of Shakespeare must stress his pertinence through re-framing, re-appropriating, adapting anew in a manner that locates fresh and distinctive pathways within familiar dramatic territory. Jonson proposes a formula – modernity must verify its utility.

To be sure, contemporary perspectives have largely met the demands of that challenge. To cite just a handful of examples, Richard III (Richard Loncraine, 1995), with Ian McKellen in the title role, sets the story of the maligned King in a fictionalised 1930s Britain; William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996), often described as "Shakespeare for the MTV Generation", sees Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the young lovers in a version that portrays the Montagues and Capulets as warring business empires on Verona Beach; whilst the BBC's ShakespeaRe-told (Mark Brozel et. al., 2005) offered modern perspectives on A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth, the latter set in Docherty's Restaurant, where Joe Macbeth (James McAvoy), his maître d' wife Ella Macbeth (Keeley Hawes), and Billy Banquo (Joseph Millson) are angered that Duncan Docherty (Vincent Regan) takes credit for Joe's work, and seek guidance from three spectral refuse collectors. Whatever the virtues or shortcomings of such adaptations may be, each illustrates broadened textual possibilities and allied outlet for reconfiguring narrative and deriving cultural salience from present-day annotations and undertones. It is to this philosophy of revision that the pieces reviewed here committed themselves. (Criticism written for New Statesman magazine).      

Creation and the Factory capture the Conscience of the King in arresting style

IT could be said that playing the melancholy Prince represents the defining challenge of any actor's career. Yet, to be called upon, spontaneously, to portray not just the neurotic Dane but another character entirely - and who plays whom is ratified in a discursive prologue among the cast - surely puts a singularly demanding complexion on an already involved theatrical endeavour. This, though, is exactly the objective the stars of Creation Theatre’s Hamlet, collaborating with the Factory Theatre Company, have set themselves - to take on, at the will of their contemporaries, a different character each night, moving seamlessly between personalities and emotions, but as if "this" were the role for which they had always prepared. The prefatory interaction tallies with the refreshingly off-the-cuff ethos of the production that follows - these opening minutes are a glorified rehearsal, not afraid to show theatre as a warts-and-all process rather than a formalised, neatly executed piece. Such an approach avoids a stuffy intellectualism that views Hamlet as a sacrosanct, untouchable member of the Canon, instead enabling the play itself to resonate with the new perspectives Creation-Factory are bringing to bear on the drama. Director Tim Carroll is the ideal compere for the evening, leading the game of stone, paper, scissors as the actors allot one another their character. Gimmicky? Absolutely, and why not?

Director Tim Carroll.

This was the first time I had seen Oxford-based Creation in action. Given the fierce, genre-traversing intelligence of this powerfully inventive rendition of Shakespeare's tragedy, I couldn't help but regret my rather belated introduction to their work. Certainly, any doubts that playing different roles each night gives the performers time to get into that new part, to adequately canvass nuances of individuality and extremity, are soundly assuaged by the cast's commitment to adapting, revising, exploring anew. When off the stage, they are forensically examining the script, and, when they return to the centre of the action, they bring intuitive dexterity to rhetoric and expression. The Norrington Room of Blackwell's Bookshop, Broad Street, was a curiously appropriate venue. Hamlet is, of course, a Philosophy student at the University of Wittenberg, and Rhys Meredith, in the title role, delivering his pained monologues among shelves of humanistic thought, resonates with the stoicism and cautious intent with which Hamlet contemplates retribution. Such surroundings create a suitably cerebral base for the action, annotating the life of a character whose uniquely inquisitive outlook and scholarly vocation make one the most sobering epistemology and abrasive determinism. A superb Meredith, though notably understating his infamously faceted role, deftly projects Hamlet's stark conflict of will and restraint with an almost seductive intensity that engages our sympathy with his moral quandary rather than scepticism over its possible resolution. That there are no evident pretensions to "the definitive Hamlet" on Meredith's part reflects more broadly the spirit of the production - contentment to be different, subversively challenging, rather than cultivating a theatrical and cinematic tradition in a bid to nefariously join a culture of thespianism without proving itself eligible through some primary reading or interpretation. Indeed, it is expressly Creation's sharply perceptive offering of something new without following in the stylistic footsteps of other adaptations that illuminates its originality and renders it so beguilingly unselfconscious.

One could argue this version of Hamlet focuses, in essence, on the interplay of the verbal and the inanimate. The audience brings along objects for the actors to use in various of the scenes. Cue sword-fighting with rag dolls and whether it really is "To be or not to be" hinging effectively on whether a wind-up toy will come to a standstill without falling from the top of a bookcase. Such vignettes, which could so easily see experiment dismissed as contrivance or irrelevance, acknowledge instead perhaps the key virtue and attraction of the surreal - that even the playful or incidental can be richly compelling, independent of pressing metaphor or broader, defined context. Some of this production's most memorable episodes see the cast wallowing in pure Python-esque silliness, purportedly little more than farce, but offering ample food for thought. I say "episodes" rather than "scenes", reflecting the glorious randomness and captivating miscellanea so much at the imaginative heart of the work. That association of text and object is present elsewhere in this version. Polonius (Jonathan Oliver) exhorts “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (I.III.62-3) as he takes apart a Russian Doll, before passing the smallest doll, a tiny figurine, to Laertes (Simon Muller). The slightest detail, the most anonymous curio, is key to the voicing of sentiment. The myriad layers of narrative are methodically dissected, but accorded emotional substance rather than pure evaluation. That the choice and use of props is not merely an arbitrary sidelight is clear in an exchange between Ophelia (Amanda Morgan) and Laertes. Sitting atop a bookcase, following Polonius’ death, Ophelia says “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts” (IV.V.174-6), taking a volume from the shelf as she makes each “offering” to him. Laertes reciprocates that gesture, saying “A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted” (IV.V.177-8), himself picking a title and reading aloud, “The Language of Thought Revisited, by Jerry A. Fodor”. Again, it seems he has taken “any book”, as if this accompanies just a marginal, throwaway line, yet the content of such a text is innate to the shades of metaphysics, psychology and representation at the core of Hamlet’s ethical conflicts. There is an attractively false simplicity in Creation’s adaptation, but which emerges through entertainment rather than a slightly trying artistic vanity – its ingenuity and its sense of fun work for rather than against one another.

Given their assiduous learning of a character's dialogue off-stage, it is little surprise to see the actors taking copies of the text onstage, in their hands or pockets. It is precisely their rejection of those sources, though, that marks the fluidity of the production, elevating pace over convention. Claudius' (John Hopkins) proclamation that "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below" (III.III.100-3), only to throw down his book, sees the action rather than poetics of language venerated - the play's psychology is too layered, tacit, to simply be digested from the page. It must be seen, witnessed, felt. The image of the book disintegrating as it falls mirrors the fragility of the orthodox, of a standard, the pragmatic subordinating any condensed definition to a linguistic aesthetic at best and empty discourse at worst. Similarly, towards the climax of the play, we see Hamlet and Laertes depart markedly from the script, suddenly dictating at speed from books of philosophical logic. Achingly funny though the sound of the actors, after such fluent delivery of Shakespeare's dialogue, tripping over the dense phraseology of syllogistic instruction is, these texts, too, are discarded. Neither the rigour of the Analytic nor the most lyrical intimations of love and madness can compensate for new and applied exegesis on Hamlet's perpetual conflicts of compassion and unreason, ambivalence and revenge. As with Nietzsche's Madman and the futile search for Godot, wherein deeds take time and they do not go, even the most stifled would-be action is valued over theory or mere idealism. The speed-reading scene, an almost iconic moment in Creation's Hamlet, recalls the manic recital of passages from Henry IV, Part 1, King Lear and Belloc's Henry King in Plath biopic Sylvia. While neither scene makes us any the wiser about power or truth tables, both are sublime voyages into the absurd, creating something distinctive without need for motivation or rationale. They are moments of pure enjoyment, which surely demand neither foundation nor justification.  

There are no standout performances in Hamlet, since each performer brings something so distinctive and unusual to their role, and with such impressive clarity – the whole affair is so oddball that critical comparisons are difficult, but, for just that reason, wonderfully superfluous. Ben Thompson and Laura Rees, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, cannot betray wry smiles at Hamlet’s wistfully sincere “I have of late…”, and Joanna Croll, as Gertrude, describes the passage of all things through Nature to eternity with telling optimism rather than clichéd profundity. 

Something may be rotten in the state of Denmark, but in Creation's Hamlet there is conducted a brilliantly original experiment in the limitations - and potential - of language and imagery in their most disparate yet salient forms. 

Hamlet runs at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Oxford, until Saturday, March 24^th - http://www.creationtheatre.co.uk/show-one

Immersion’s Caesar: Of hypocrisy and catharsis

Following their acclaimed productions of The Importance of Being Earnest, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, Immersion Theatre bring an aesthetically charged Julius Caesar to the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, Lewisham. Co-directed by James Tobias and Roderick D. Morgan, this rendition sustains all the tension of the Roman epic, but sets it among the streets of a contemporary bohemia. It is precisely the heady mix of a modern perspective and the incorrigible hedonism of this environment that weaves so vividly the tapestry of murder, ego and denial that unfolds. Arguably the most distinctive quality of this adaptation is a female lead – as Caesar, Anna Bond strikingly conveys the power as well as the vulnerability of the Emperor, deftly mixing authority and a telling sense of destiny. Equally significant is the production’s deletion of much of Act 2, putting the focus more specifically on Caesar’s assassination. Far from too heavily channeling the action as a result, it is precisely this brevity – reducing the play to some 90 minutes – that lends due focus to Caesar’s fate and the dense psychology of the perpetrators before and after their crime.

In keeping with all the quiet anarchism implied by “a bohemia”, the costumes are as alternative as they are personalised. An early exchange between Brutus (Liam Mulvey, making his Brockley Jack debut) and Portia (Jodie Raven) sees her shimmering white dress contrast almost amusingly with his black leather jacket and boots, a wonderfully peculiar but authentic collision of the formal, the quaint, and coarse masculinity.

Immersion’s Julius Caesar is a compelling example of how visual techniques can lie at the creative centre of an adaptation without giving artistic licence carte blanche to supplant narrative coherence or emotional impact. Such an aesthetic virtue is cultivated by the absence of a stage and the minimal use of props. The lack of a platform and the limited set design create a suitably raw atmosphere that humanises the actor-audience "relationship" without mollifying thematic resonance or negating its effect.

This take on the play, then, directs its attention specifically on the killing, and on the cocktail of hypocrisy and twisted fantasies of liberation through which the act is planned and executed. “Let’s kill [her] boldly, but not roughly” says Brutus to Cassius (Rochelle Parry). The schism between Brutus’ fiercely aggressive individuality and his effort to implant a morbid virtue into the killing is tantalizing. Little could dissuade him from the malevolent path on which he sets himself, but even he grasps for “boldness”, his insidious sense of the “rightness” of the act. The perverse nobility idealised by Brutus echoes Lady Macbeth’s grim assurance to her husband, after Duncan’s murder, that “A little water clears us of this deed” (II.II.68), the purifying of the body purportedly eradicating the sin. Such rampant hypocrisy is not unique to Brutus, though. The flickering lighting in which the drama is washed at the moment of Caesar’s downfall gives an impression of murder in slow motion, a chilling interplay of glee and animalistic intent among conspirators practicing their warped belief that self-sanctioned bloodlust can bestow catharsis and excuse sadism. Immersion’s Caesar offers a notably intuitive study in the mentality of politics, and how power shifts have, across histories and cultures, so often been secured through the most horrific manifestations of will.

How might a departure from our conventional view of Caesar colour our reading of Shakespeare's study of power and politics?

To its credit, the production resists a temptation to add new intellectual layers to an already involved theatrical experience. True, a female Caesar may invigorate salient debates about a certain feminist empowerment undone by the savage realities of power play and the appalling subjugation of the body, but this rendition wisely sets that context aside - Caesar, in part at least, is a meditation on authority and ambition, to which narrative priority this version adheres, rather than tangentially asking how a leftfield casting of its title character might engage issues of gender and deposition. To that extent, Immersion's Caesar is pleasingly unselfconscious about the would-be questions it implicitly generates - the play's the thing, after all, and, here, polemic and entertainment are advisedly estranged.

None of this is to say, though, that Immersion is unwilling to play fast and loose with the original narrative, but without losing sight of themes of ambition and responsibility. Following “her” murder, a blood-flecked Caesar appears to Brutus and asserts that “she” will see him again, in the imminent battle, “Ay, at Philippi”. Caesar makes good on those words, returning amid the carnage to stab Brutus. It is the grim antithesis of the Road to Emmaus, a figure initially unrecognised but promising salvation, yet with, here, a victim only too clearly revealing himself, to exact the most gaunt, adamant retribution.

Despite Banquo's gruesome appearance to Macbeth, here depicted in Théodore Chassériau's 1854 canvas, Immersion contemplates how a "ghost made real" constitutes an ethics of retribution.

Caesar's murder of Brutus, in a "metaphysics made real", completes the revenge that Banquo, in Macbeth's "conventional hallucination", cannot take. Caesar's return makes surrealism a reality, the unthinkable rendered flesh, whereas Macbeth's vision of his victim, for all its hypnotic terror, remains a mere orthodoxy, with a murderer threatened but not placated. Immersion, then, tests the aesthetic and moral limits of the absurd, in a manner as horrific as it is welcome, our innate desire for justice satisfied, however gruesome its realisation. Caesar roundly subverts Kent's exhortation to Edgar to "vex not his [Lear's] ghost" (V.III.317). Here, it is a phantom of retribution that vexes the living, to our curious ethical approval. In considering the nuances of human action, it is, sometimes, perhaps only in evaluations of revenge that the philosophical conundrum of whether "good" and "moral" are synonyms is truly erroneous. In Immersion's Caesar, that a wrong has been undone is sufficient and oddly warranted – the sobering manner of that amends is a conceptual footnote.  

Much has been said about Immersion Theatre’s methods of storytelling, their originality and insights. Julius Caesar is no exception, not afraid to challenge faithful adaptations through this memorable, thought-provoking offering. Certainly a Company to follow closely.

The Immersion Theatre website can be viewed at http://www.immersiontheatre.co.uk/

Lear at the Rose: The Party’s Over

The opening scene of House on the Hill’s King Lear, staged at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, could just as easily be taken from Evelyn Waugh. A glittering drinks party at the “court” of Lear, the ageing King of Britain, has all the trappings of a 1920s gathering of the Bright Young Things. Given that parallel aesthetic, Lear is as much the compere as the monarch, standing on a platform in front of a map of the kingdom. Doomed though Lear’s bid to determine which of his daughters “doth love us most” (I.I.53) may be, the black-suited courtiers and immaculately-dressed ladies effortlessly convey all the unhinged sycophantism at the heart of this scene-setting. It will, of course, be only a matter of time before somebody embarrasses Goneril (Elisa Ashenden) and Regan’s (Jessica Guise) nefarious obedience to their father, and it is Cordelia (Emma-Jane Martin) who brings convivial proceedings to a halt, and is thus the catalyst for her father’s madness. Julian Bird, in the title role, makes vanity an art form as the ruler who, in his black-jacketed pretension, struggles to compose himself amid Cordelia’s reticence over his maniacal love quest, a man blind to the strength rather than purported weakness of his youngest daughter’s feeling. Elisa Ashenden and Emma-Jane Martin, in particular, evoke brilliantly the respective fawning and vulnerability of characters venerated or scorned for letting the jaded matriarch hear what he does, and does not, want to hear. Cordelia’s hesitations innately confound the deftly-engineered “propriety” of the opening wine reception, but it is precisely that brittle respectability that stresses its falsity and her integrity.

As regards the king’s burgeoning unreason, it has sometimes been said the Fool is Lear’s only true friend, a man able to mollify his rage and guide him through torment at its most consuming. Although, as the Fool, Felix Trench is suitably impish and child-like, one wonders at times if Trench’s disarming surrealism betrays the Fool’s curiously grounded intelligence. Trench carries off the wordplay impeccably, but perhaps at the expense of the Fool’s emotional affinity with Lear that humanises the former’s eccentricities and sees him more at one with the sovereign than certain characters, Goneril and Regan especially, are or even seek to be. That said, Lear’s “paternal” link with the Fool is conveyed touchingly by Julian Bird, whose plea “Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!” (I.V.52) sees him momentarily look beyond his neurosis to idealise a renewed sense of purpose and a stable throne. As a crude undoing of that hope, though, Lear and the Fool go onto the storm-battered heath. Behind the stage, a vast wasteland setting evokes the heath, an appropriately naked outpost on which Lear remonstrates with the elements, supposing that he can command Nature: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!”. There is something almost apocalyptic about the barren landscape in which his unreason reaches its peak, and Set Designer Kate Hall impressively evokes the nothingness that illustrates the king’s estrangement from humanity and order.

With chilling seamlessness, Elisa Ashenden is a loving and singularly manipulative Goneril.

Having ingratiated themselves to their father’s pride simply to assume their own form of mutual power, Goneril and Regan exact a terrible punishment on the traitor Gloucester (Sid Herbert), with Cornwall (Jamie Laird) gauging out the Earl’s eyes. That as much is suggested as “witnessed” in the torture scene exacerbates its horror – we are left to imagine a brutality engineered by two siblings who have effectively taken control of the kingdom, bounded only by their own twisted conception of justice. Sid Herbert cautiously distinguishes suffering from pathos, engaging our sympathy but no sense that, in a play so populated with victims, he is singularly afflicted. Even amid the extremities of Gloucester’s plight, Herbert downplays that violation, committing fully to the role without dominating the scene or muting his fellow actors’ contributions.

As Cordelia, Emma-Jane Martin illuminates a daughter's vulnerability and a father's hypocrisy.

The final scene, parading the appalling consequences of Lear’s delegation of lands in return for expressions of love, is tightly played out, precisely because the restricted performance space brings performers and action into such closeted surroundings. The presentation of Goneril and Regan’s bodies is as lyrical as it is appalling, adding a strange tenderness to the dual fate of such malevolent, calculating characters. Julian Bird endows his lament for Cordelia, “I might have sav’d her; now she’s gone for ever!” (V.III.272-3), with a telling balance of its hypocrisy and compassion, the moving and the pathetic annotating his grief without negating the cruelty of his earliest interactions with her. Perhaps Stephen McLeod, as Edgar, delivering the closing lines of the play, “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young, shall never see so much, nor live so long” (V.III.325-8), expresses those final sentiments a little hurriedly, but that is small matter in a rendition intelligently performed and directed perceptively by Grace Wessells.

King Lear runs at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, until Saturday, March 31^st - http://www.rosetheatre.org.uk/events/king-lear-by-william-shakespeare/