Pillow talk ... Mark Ravenhill in Edinburgh in 2007. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
April 21 update: On Sunday morning I was at Village Underground, a railway arch in Shoreditch, for five more bite-sized chunks of theatre courtesy of Mark Ravenhill. Having started out with a spring in my step, I've been left with a nagging case of cultural indigestion.
The venue, a new spot for arts events and happenings, is a real find. Disused, graffitied tube train carriages parked on the roof double as makeshift offices. The cavernous warehouse space beneath has a similar ambience to Southwark Playhouse and the Shunt Vaults, minus the gloom, fridge-like temperatures and smell of damp.
Paines Plough's productions, performed on raised wooden platforms, were put together with skill and bite by Roxana Silbert. The cast included actors at the top of their game (such as Michelle Fairley, Deborah Findlay and Raquel Cassidy), although having the same performers appearing in all five playlets accentuated the increasingly wearying similarities between them.
After 10 of Ravenhill's mini-plays, the sense of enticing multiplicity has worn thin. It does rather feel as if the plays are coming up with the same buzzwords, ostentatiously winking at each other without ever really getting it on together.
Paradise Lost introduces us to Liz, who has to decide whether to intervene when she hears screams coming from downstairs. A soldier demands sexual favours in Love (But I Won't Do That). Women of Troy has a chorus of well-heeled women asking: "Why do you bomb us? We are the good people." War of the Worlds is another chorus piece, this time about the thirst for public mourning and how quickly such outpourings of sympathy can curdle. A woman whose country has been invaded chokes to death on a sandwich pinched from an official in Twilight of the Gods.
Ravenhill is trying very hard to sell some sweeping ideas about the smugness of those who have the luxury of living in a liberal democracy. If he doesn't quite succeed, it's because he doesn't know when to stop: every point is made again and again. The cycle has contained some gleeful satires, and the weaker plays are beefed up by the strong ones. Ravenhill can be very funny when on the attack, but I ended up wishing that he would sideline the sarcasm.
I zoned in and out of the last short, Yesterday an Incident Occurred, on Radio 3 last night, and the end of this marathon delivered something like relief. I'd expected to feel a sense of achievement, like Charlotte Higgins watching all of Shakespeare's history plays. But, to be honest, half a dozen of the plays would have delighted me enough.
April 17 update: Pitching up at the Prince Albert pub next to the Gate Theatre, I am given instructions to "wait for the angel". So when a surly bloke with fluffy white wings arrives at the door, I follow him and the glowing orange tip of his cigarette into the night, along with a small gaggle of fellow Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat spectators, including the playwright.
The winged-one leads us to a private garden in Notting Hill Gate. En route, a woman who's seen seven of Ravenhill's shorts so far remarks how the play cycle provides a taster of the varied styles of the directors involved. The two Gate productions reflect Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell's abiding interest in site-specific work.
First up is Women in Love. We walk through greenery, and down a crunchy gravel pathway lit up like an airport runway, towards three performers standing in front of mikes. They begin to speak. Dan is undergoing chemotherapy and his girlfriend Anna is determined that he shouldn't watch the TV news. The couple tease each other, offering candy-floss-sweet endearments. Anna is a kind of Eve in reverse, keeping Dan away from the tree of knowledge: "Nothing happened in the world today... and I love you". The playlet ends with a pinprick of insight.
Armageddon, the first show in the series to be performed in American accents, feels less disposable. Its characters are born-again Christians tussling with temptation. We are shepherded into a tiny hotel room, where Emma (a dolorous-looking Madeleine Potter) ends up sprawled on the bed like a Tennessee Williams heroine. She is meeting a younger man, played by Gary Shelford, who pulls off the feat of seeming both upright and clammy with pent-up desire.
The "angels with broken wings" imagery crops up again, though it doesn't really build to anything. Still, there are poignant traces of lyricism, and the actors give affecting performances. I suspect I'm spending too much time piecing together Ravenhill's mosaic of brief scenes. They've clearly infiltrated my subconscious: several characters, and Ravenhill himself, popped up in my dreams last night, which feels odd, to say the least.
April 16 update: A couple are having supper in the downstairs bar in the Royal Court Theatre, twiddling their forks, eying each other warily as they masticate. The pair is a picture of wired-up tension. On the table between them is a crackling baby monitor, the sound ratcheted up so high that the child's breath could be mistaken for Darth Vader taking a nap.
This nervy dinner table scene -- the latest instalment of Mark Ravenhill's 514Shoot/GetTreasure/Repeat -- is played out in front of 90 or so cross-legged and lounging spectators. The husband and wife arguing over whether to move to a gated community in Fear and Misery are pristine, nattily suited: the play is sweat-stained, its punches fairly predictable. Still, Ravenhill's shorts deserve a more sizeable audience to argue over them, appreciate them, and even hate them.
Last week I wanted to guzzle down the playlets in one or two sittings, rather than graze on them over the course of three weeks, but now I'm really appreciating the different start times for these shows (see Lyn Gardner's prescient blog.
The Mother and Birth of a Nation started at 6.30pm and 9pm, giving you time to fit in a leisurely supper between shows, or to see one of the longer plays at the Royal Court as well. I wish audiences got the chance to see short plays before or after longer ones more often: this makes a lot of sense given that, these days, main stage productions can last little over an hour.
Fear and Misery is sharply acted, particularly by Joseph Millson as a paranoid city-type who keeps peremptorily demanding reassurance ("Cuddles!") from his wife. But, as an evocation of terror and alarm, it is nowhere near sharp enough. The couple's fears are spelled out for us -- there's no range of emotional shading here -- and their piggy behaviour could be much funnier.
War and Peace, which is staged in a shadowy nook of the Royal Court bar, takes a darker and more twisted turn, and does a better job of suggesting that the madness of war is everywhere. It's a ghostly encounter between a young boy of unnerving poise (the aforementioned couple's son) and a soldier (Burn Gorman, with a gaping red gash in his skull). There's no happily ever after to this creepy bedtime story, merely an "on and on".
Tomorrow: two promenade productions at the Gate Theatre.
April 10 update: It's a shame that people don't seem to be racing around the different venues staging Mark Ravenhill's short plays this month. There was an audience of, at a guess, 100 or so for the two shows I saw on the main stage at the Royal Court earlier this week. The playlets I saw at the National Theatre over the weekend pulled bigger crowds.
This week's Ravenhills at the Royal Court are The Mother and Birth of a Nation. In The Mother, a couple of soldiers must tell a slovenly woman (played by Lesley Manville, with a fag hanging from her lips) that her son has been killed in combat. Birth of a Nation, elicited squirms, knowing titters and barks of laughter from the arty audience, thanks to the play's self-involved creative types (a painter, a dancer, a writer and a guy who makes "art performance installation bonkers things").
I'm beginning to think it was a mistake not to offer punters the chance to see all 16 Ravenhill shorts over one long weekend. After all, Tom Stoppard's bum-punishing Coast of Utopia trilogy at the National proved that audiences don't have a problem with cultural marathons. Anyway, on with the next plays ...
April 7: Short doesn't have to mean unambitious when it comes to plays. Mark Ravenhill's epic cycle of 16 playlets, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, is one of the most intriguing theatrical events of the year so far.
The 20-minute plays, which began life at Edinburgh last year under the title Ravenhill for Breakfast, explore "the personal and political effect of war on modern life". Throughout April, they are being performed at venues across London, and the final play will be aired on Radio 3.
There are monologues, two-handers, three-handers and choral pieces, making up around five and a half hours of theatre in total. They can be watched as individual plays (tickets cost a fiver each), but the playwright would like them to be seen together as "a big piece that would capture our urge to bring our model of freedom and democracy to the world, even as we withdraw into more and more fearfully isolated groups at home."
It won't be easy for audiences to take in the whole shebang: you can't watch the shows in just one or two sittings. Scattered as they are across different venues at different times of day, they challenge you to set out on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt. I saw only a few in Edinburgh, so I'm taking up the Ravenhill challenge and watching all 16. In a series of blogs, I'll be piecing together the jigsaw Ravenhill has created.
The marathon kicked off at the National, where I warmed with up four shows over the weekend. Each play takes its title from a classic work. The Mikado follows a couple whose light conversation dries up when one makes a dramatic revelation. In The Odyssey, a gaggle of soldiers prepare to return home after invading a foreign country. Intolerance has a middle-class wife and mother suffering mysterious intestinal pains. Crime and Punishment finds a young soldier questioning a woman in an occupied zone, and the interrogation rapidly turns into torture.
Watching a few of the plays gives you the sense of ideas and arguments dizzily multiplied. The same themes, images and phrases litter the scripts: angels with broken wings, gated communities and the mantra of "freedom and democracy". So far, the plays seem less like a majestic analysis of the so-called war on terror than a viciously funny attack. War in a distant country and its fallout back home is a grotesque situation that Ravenhill often plays as exuberant, if uneasy, black comedy.
For the most part, Ravenhill brings shafts of sardonic humour to bear with surgical precision. The playwright is probing western liberal guilt, sanctimony and hypocrisy, but his satire is offset by a creeping sympathy for his characters, who are adrift and baffled, damaged and sad.
It's a shame that the plays were only given semi-stagings at the National. My guess is that full productions weren't possible on the grounds of cost, but the staged readings at Edinburgh's Traverse were actually more effective: they let your imagination fill in the gaps.
