Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well.
This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen.
Sacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning tale of choirgirls gone wild. Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame, adapts Alan Warner’s 1998 novel with a similarly shrewd grasp of youthful hope amidst challenging circumstances, and with the arts once again proving a vital escape – albeit, in this case, temporarily.
There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back onto the one behind, who in turn rolls back onto the one behind and, before you know it, the three off them have formed a human totem pole. It’s one of those things where your eyes can’t quite believe it’s happened. But then there’s a lot of that with Casus. They major in physical impossibility.
Casus, appearing in the Theatre Royal at Brighton Festival, are a five-piece Australian outfit – at least for the purposes of this show – consisting of two women and three men. Driftwood is performed, all smiles, all the time, and there’s a loose conceptual theme, which is helping one and other, being a collective unit. Happily, the whole is spiced with easy good humour. A regular problem with high-end circus is that it can be presented po-faced, beautifully lit, but utterly serious, like an art installation. No such issues here, and a full house, including many small children, clapping regularly at their feats, is a testament to the fact this lot can entertain on multiple levels.
Driftwood begins under a regular domestic, drum-style lamp shade, lowered from the heavens, which the ensemble throng under, moving in a circle, gripping one another, like human waves. Throughout 70 minutes of intense, acrobatic physicality, multiple types of skill are shown. An early highlight comes when one member is held between two and used as a skipping rope for another, while there's also a lovely sequence of hoop play, 15 feet off the ground, intricate and thrillingly dangerous-looking, to the gentle soundtrack of Gotye’s ballad “Heart’s a Mess”.
Comedy is provided by, among much else, Casus co-founders Jesse Scott and Lachlan McAulay playing off their difference in height, or a sequence in which a clothes horse is dressed with much clowning. By the same token, there are moments of pure visual artistry, where the audience makes noises of quiet wonderment, such as a simple but eye-boggling piece where one of the men places his back in the lamp-light and contorts his musculature into all manner of shadowed physical shapes.
Watching this performance, the mind almost suffers astonishment fatigue for, by the end, I'm taking for granted things that are unachievable for 99.9 percent of us. There are moments so startling they remain on the mind’s eye for some time afterwards. One such is a sequence involving three members hooping, with four hoops each, until they are spread equidistantly on their bodies. It’s a hypnotic sight that the retina absorbs yet takes a moment fully to comprehend. There is much else in a similarly brain-boggling vein, rope work and extraordinary balancing skills, but let’s leave those, for circuses need spoilers as little as any other art from. Suffice to say Driftwood is a show it would be difficult to walk out of feeling anything other than awed.
Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Casus Circus's Driftwood
Sovremennik is Russian for “contemporary”, and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre company has lived by the idea that it expresses new, fresh breath in Russian theatre. Unless you argue that the adjective “contemporary” by definition must reveal characteristics of its temporal surroundings, moribund is not one of the alternative meanings of the word. Or in this case one should argue positively that Galina Volchek's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters does comment subversively on today.
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless characters into inescapable constellations of behavior that have resonated through several millennia.
Is God female? It says a lot about Yaël Farber’s pompous and overblown new version of this biblical tale at the National Theatre that, near the end of an almighty 110-minute extravaganza, all reason seemed to have vacated my brain, and its empty halls, battered by a frenzy of elevated music, heaven-sent lighting and wildly gesturing actors, were suddenly open to the oddest ideas. You could call it the Salomé effect.
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen.
No one ever went to the theatre for the sound design. Indeed, only the nerdiest theatregoers could name a single practitioner of the art. But imagine attending a production by Katie Mitchell or Robert Icke or Ivo van Hove – or any less overtly authorial theatremakers – with the sound design stripped out. The visual story would be immeasurably impoverished.
How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced sterilisation of the disabled in several countries, starting in America in the 1920s and continung in Sweden into the 1970s; its legacy is today’s screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome.