Noises OFF
2014 Issue 2 Monday 14th April
Today’s Contents
3 Reviews - My Fragrant Phantom 7 Reviews - The Duck Pond 9 Criticism as a Team Sport 10 Who Controls the Past Now 11 Three of the Best 12 A Complete Culture Secretary
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Photo (c) Giulia Delprato
Bright Young Things Billy Barrett
In Your Fragrant Phantom, Zelda Fitzgerald calls her daughter “a beautiful little fool.” As we know from Daisy in The Great Gatsby, “that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world”. If F. Scott scorned Daisy, history’s been even less kind to her real-life counterpart. Another Southern Belle turned flapper with little time for domesticity, Zelda remains the author’s bad, mad wife in the popular imagination. Thankfully, Whiteslate Theatre offer a more enlightened account in this sensitive if safely staged portrayal of mental health and addiction in a tempestuous celebrity marriage. Katherine Hardman and Craig Hamilton are captivating as the couple – two gently flickering bright young things. Hardman manages to encapsulate that dizzying, magnetic quality that must have made Zelda the star of every party, while Hamilton’s Scott is a stern and stifling paternalist, leaving our sympathies very much in “herstory” over his. Then there’s that title, of course. Your Fragrant Phantom: calling card for a paranormal prostitute, or official cologne of The Phantom of the Opera? It’s also downright difficult to pronounce, and does little to conjure the couple’s rocky relationship or the rollicking backdrop of the epoch. The phrase comes from a line Zelda says to her husband about her lingering presence with him during the war
- a distance that’s captured nicely through the pair’s exchanging of letters. Playwright Jenna Hobbs’s script breezily blends poetic flights with expository dialogue. Her conceit of writing and rewriting history, fiction feeding off fact, is a neat one for transporting these figures’ lives from the page to the stage. Scott and Zelda are back from the grave to set the record straight, and the framing device of interacting with the audience as we enter is a nice touch, though it’s a shame this doesn’t continue throughout the piece. At the end, it’s totally abandoned; when the pair take their curtain call it’s clearly as actors, the established frame hanging loosely off one side. The staging’s simplicity is also charming, though it’s a little perplexing that while we can easily imagine a chair as a rock or a rolledup page as an ice cream cone, Hardman’s required to change costume onstage several times. Aside from the depressing double standard – why does Scott not strip to his boxers? – it’s stylistically inconsistent, even if its intention is to show Zelda’s love for glittery accoutrements. Overall, an enjoyable piece with some tense darker moments – though these could have been pushed further for a harder emotional punch.
Reviews - My Fragrant Phantom
Hardman manages to encapsulate that dizzying, magnetic quality that must have made Zelda the star of every party
Reviews - My Fragrant Phantom 4
Boom and Bust Georgia Snow
In so many ways F. Scott Fitzgerald and his was; even in its rockiest of patches, one was wife Zelda epitomised the boom and bust of nothing without the other. In their real lives, America’s Jazz Age. Hedonistic, flamboyant Zelda was to die eight years after her husband and impassioned they blazed across the New in 1948, when the mental hospital she was York scene, lighting up his literary career, and staying in caught fire (he of a heart attack). later hers, in their wake. But the popping of Zelda (Katharine Hardman) flits around, this particular party balloon changing from outfit to saw them tumble into outfit, keeping F. Scott (Craig Their messy, alcoholism, adultery and, Hamilton) within her haze of in Zelda’s case, years of tempestuous inebriating inhibition. She mental health troubles. marriage falls away is, in her mind, the tragic Jenna Hobbs’ Your Fragrant heroine of her own life novel around them, just Phantom charts the rise and Hardman captures this as the roaring and fall of America’s in a well-observed balance of infamous literary couple in fragility and force. twenties did. a two-hander that examines The plagiarism of their own the progression of their life together in both their relationship through their work signals the beginning own memory. In a piece where time flows as of the crash, and their messy, tempestuous freely as the whisky they guzzle, we witness marriage falls away around them, just as the the couple’s entire relationship, from its freeroaring twenties did. spirited start to its caustic end. Suzanna Ward’s production captures the Your Fragrant Phantom, in aiming to be part exuberance and intoxication of the pair’s early biography, has to transfer a richly eventful relationship and of the era. Whether Zelda and complex marriage into a single narrative was wronged or he was, it doesn’t matter; strand. Inevitably, the painful truths occur they were the quintessence of his self-styled only in the couple’s sometimes self-edited Jazz Age that even with the poisonous later reminiscences and are sterilised as a result. years, neither would have been quite the force What this production does do is illuminate just without the other. how all consuming their love for each other
Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca
Reviews - My Fragrant Phantom
Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca
The Boring Twenties Adam Foster
In Jenna Hobbs’s two-hander, Your Fragrant Phantom, F. Scott (Craig Hamilton) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Katharine Hardman) retell their own story of love, loss and legacy. As they swirl around the ballroom, Martini in hand, they epitomise the alluring spirit of the Roaring Twenties. The play is, clearly, a meditation on the act of writing, on love and on the past, but I think there’s a reading which situates it as a meditation on the notion of celebrity. Indeed, Your Fragrant Phantom served to remind me that this phenomenon is nothing new and that, actually, the conditions of celebrity culture existed long before the inauguration of tabloids and Twitter. Hobbs, together with director Suzanna Ward, establish a fluid playing space in their presentation of the Fitzgeralds’ story, which, like the lives it relays, blurs the lines of reality and fiction, moving between direct address and a kind of sepia-filter realism. There’s some traction in this. Not only does it allow for an interrogation of the challenges of bibliography and memory, but it serves to highlight our relationship to proceedings as that of a spectator. In this set-up, even when the party’s over and the cocktails have stopped flowing,
Scott and Zelda can never escape the gaze of the public eye. Another key dramaturgical feature of Hobbs’s play is her decision to intersect her own dialogue with extracts from the books and letters of Scott and Zelda. While this engenders a rich lyricism, the problem with this structural logic is the intrinsic lack of narrative drive. Indeed, the pacing drops significantly towards the end of the play, with Hobbs presenting a variation of the same scene several times and, in the process, bringing proceedings to a virtual standstill. The play is boosted by strong performances from its two protagonists, with Hardman and Hamilton bringing the necessary balance of intimacy and anguish to the Fitzgeralds’s relationship. It is, though, a relationship that has been the subject of numerous unsuccessful stage and screen adaptations, with Tennessee Williams’s Clothes for A Summer Hotel being the most notable example. That play was a notorious critical and commercial failure, and I’m not sure this fares much better. Despite its initial promise, Your Fragrant Phantom lacks the courage of its convictions and, unlike the relationship it portrays, is ultimately unremarkable.
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Reviews - My Fragrant Phantom
Indulging in Flapper Glamour Anna Himali Howard
During the highly manufactured cultural buzz around Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, in which flapper dresses and feathered accessories were being pushed into fashion, much of the hype around the film seemed to bypass the social commentary in Gatsby in favour of Jazz Age glamour. Your Fragrant Phantom aims to explore “what happened when the party was over?” The play has all the tools to deconstruct what it calls “the facade of the sparkling flapper” - when it’s not indulging in it. The Fitzgeralds dance the Lindy Hop together; not slick with bright lipstick smiles, but messy and exhausting, and more joyful for it. The play looks for the hidden marital conflicts underneath the 1920s socialite lifestyle, and it is expressed at its best in playful, spontaneous and often dark games between the couple. However, when it ventures into couples’ therapy, both the playfulness and the Jazz Age exposé are lost. The characters’ deep underlying issues are exposed clumsily when placed in conversation or storytelling, and verbal emotional revelations tell what has already been shown. With her frequent changes into a colourful array of flapper-style dresses, while Scott remains steadfastly suited up, Zelda becomes a vintage shop mannequin and struggles to tell her story. Your Fragrant Phantom offers an alternative perspective, both on male writerly genius and the Roaring Twenties, but it too often partakes in our collective obsession with “flapper glamour” when it could be questioning it.
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Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca
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Adam Foster
It’s Tchaikovsky at the fairground; an eccentric comparisons and are beginning to establish an re-imagining of Swan Lake which substitutes unmistakable style and aesthetic of their own. leotards and pirouettes for blow-up hammers More than anything I’ve seen at the Festival and ticker tape. To celebrate Prince Siegried’s so far, The Duck Pond is characterised by a (James Bennett) 21st birthday, Queen conviction of style, in terms of its aesthetic and Hildergarde (Lauren Lyle) brings a travelling content. Even when it dispenses with fairground Russian fairground to town run fun and moves towards its conclusion, the piece by the evil Rothbart (Tom is sensitive to what has come before Figgins). He’s cast a and is aware that audiences require a spell on Odin (Tom transitional space between horseplay Coxon), and waterworks. And, trust me, there causing are tears aplenty. him to become Shamefully, I’ve never seen Swan a plastic Lake, and so the show’s ending hook-a-duck snuck up on me more by day, only than it should becoming human have done. at night. Odin and Nevertheless, the Prince soon if you fail to fall in love, and be moved when when the sun mother and goes down and desolate son dance the balloon moon beneath the fading Photo (c) Giulia Delprato rises, all manner of balloon moonlight, well, mischievous mayhem you haven’t got a heart. It ensues. took me well and truly by surprise. Despite the impression of spontaneous tomfoolery, The Duck Pond is grounded by a rigid structure which allows for the moments of intermittent freedom on which it thrives. In those moments it’s a ceaselessly resourceful show, which boasts a catalogue of ingenious inventions, many of which drew audible gasps from last night’s audience. The show is further served by its Hobbycraft aesthetic, a home-made fairground which swells and unfolds to reveal a number of beautiful stage images. The Duck Pond sits happily alongside the early work of Little Bulb and Kneehigh, deploying a variation on this sort of playful visual landscape. It is to their great credit that withWings move beyond these
Reviews -The Duck Pond
If it Looks Like a Duck...
The performances are excellent. Lauren Lyle, blessed with an instinctive grasp of comic timing, is hilarious as Queen Hildergarde. Tom Figgins as Rothbart, meanwhile, can act as well as he can sing, which is saying something. The moments of dance could have been integrated more delicately, as opposed to existing as stand-alone set pieces. Actually, there could have been more dancing full stop. Particularly from Tom Coxon, who showed glimpses of an impressive movement vocabulary, combining athleticism with a compelling rawness of feeling. The Duck Pond transfers to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, and if you contrived to miss it here in Scarborough, you’d do well to catch it there. You won’t be disappointed.
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Reviews - The Duck Pond
Confetti, Rubber Ducks and a Singing Cake Slice Rachael Murray
Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca
A new show inspired by Swan Lake doesn’t the overhanging sense of tragedy that comes necessarily sound like the most exciting with the knowledge that this delight can’t last. prospect. However, The Duck Pond is so The set fits perfectly with the whimsical feeling much more than just a reimagining of the of the show: a hook-a-duck stall stands centre simple story. While it does tell the love story stage and a whole host of other funfair games very successfully, the narrative is punctuated are revealed throughout, cementing the story as with dance, music and audience interaction, a coming-of-age for the naïve prince. managed so seamlessly by the cast that they While this may run the risk of being more cease to seem distinct from the rest of the gushing than critical, any criticism I give would play; joining in feels like the natural position for be simply clutching at straws the audience, in no small for the sake of it. I may have The Duck Pond is part due to the warm and rolled my eyes when we were inviting performances of a celebration. A told in the Opening Ceremony the chorus. Tchaikovsy’s celebration to which that at some point in this ballet is referenced directly Festival we would see a show all of the audience at times, but always in ways that would rank as one of that are genuinely comic are invited the best we’ve ever seen, or poignant, never in a way simply because a week-long that comes across as being festival doesn’t have as much opportunity smug or “for ballet fans only”. for the blowing of minds as several years of To put it simply, The Duck Pond is a celebration. theatre-going does. But The Duck Pond proved A celebration to which all of the audience are my scepticism foolish. As I dried my eyes during invited – both in the literal sense of being given the well-deserved standing ovation, I wasn’t presents and told we’re going to a party, and thinking “should the dances have lasted long?” also in showing us a relationship so tender and or “was it right to light the audience at that bit?” pure that we can revel in it. We can’t help but Quite simply, I felt like I’d been wrapped in a become completely invested, despite knowing fluffy yellow blanket , had a bobble hat jammed better than to expect a happy ending. The on my head, and been invited to be a part of “first date” sequence in particular manages to something very special. capture both the innocent joy of the play and
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Criticism as a Team Sport Adam Foster
In the first midday discussion of this year’s Festival, the writer, actress and NSDF selector Steph Street noted the extent to which she gives prevalence to the quality of acting over any other element when analysing a production. This recalls Matt Trueman’s model of “criticism as a team sport”, which seems an especially pertinent model for theatre criticism in the context of this Festival. The team sport model relies on the idea that someone else will have covered the plot, or the lighting design, or the costumes in their review of any given production. This, in turn, enables writers to riff on the minutiae of a production safe in the knowledge that someone has their back in critical terms. While this model necessitates that reviews may not always offer entirely comprehensive accounts of the event itself, it enables writers to articulate more precisely what the production meant to *them*. More than anything else, Trueman calls for “a reciprocal, conversational relationship with readers and other writers” which, to me, seems entirely apt for Noises Off and the festival in general.
What do you think? Noises Off is all about your opinions, your ideas and your writing. Think we’re missing something? we’ve got something wrong or you can expand on a story? Tell us! Use the comments on the website, come find us in the Spa Music Room or, better still, write your own piece.
Despite the large number of performers at NSDF, the festival plays host to a variety of practitioners, from technicians to tenors and everything in between. Inevitably, a singer or a musician will take something very different from a production than a dramatist or a make-up artist might. And so they should. My reviews, for example, are likely to consider dramaturgical elements in much greater depth than, say, the hair and make-up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s completely fine for a review not to mention *everything*, so long as someone who feels passionately about another aspect contributes to what should be an ongoing conversation. Besides, if one person had to cover every single element of a production in a review it would likely read more like a shopping list than any sort of useful analysis. So, yeah, join the discussion. Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk
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Who Controls the Past Now... Georgia Snow Reinterpretation and reinvention play out year on year here at NSDF. Each April a new cohort brings the best student drama to Scarborough, where theatre is performed, developed and discussed within the creative community the Festival generates. Inevitably, some playwrights crop up time and time again. In the years I have been coming to NSDF, there is often at least one play by Simon Stephens, sometimes more. This year’s offering, his 2009 play Punk Rock, is being produced by ArtsEd and follows on from Pornography last year, and Bluebird and Pornography in 2011.
on the programme. ENRON and Jerusalem appeared in the West End in 2010, Spring Awakening in 2009, and the ill-fated Rent Remixed in 2007. The interpretation of text, staging and performance in these shows will perhaps come under more scrutiny than some of the Festival’s other offerings, considering the number of people who will probably have seen at least one of these shows on the West End in the fairly recent past.
withWings, who brought a brilliant reinvention of The Tempest to ISDF in Sheffield in 2012 with If Room Enough, and who first performed at NSDF in 2006, return with The Duck Pond, a contemporary imagining of Swan Lake. If If Room Enough Taking risks and trying anything to go by, the out ideas are integral to isoriginal will only be present the creative atmosphere deep in the piece’s soul, but will nonetheless drive it from of NSDF. beginning to end.
Stephens’ contemporary and challenging plays lend themselves to student drama; they promote collaboration between actors and directors and are versatile enough to accommodate bold, often risky choices.
Taking risks and trying out ideas are integral to the creative atmosphere of NSDF. The Festival provides a platform that allows and embraces risk-taking and courageous choices: not only is it not blighted by a ticket-sales mentality (most shows will play to a full house), but the Festival also produces endless opportunity for discussion, debate and dialogue with both peers and professionals. There is a cyclical quality to NSDF, which manifests itself in the people who come here before embarking on professional careers. There is a reminder of that this year, as Lucy Prebble’s acclaimed ENRON will be performed at the festival. It will be the first time one of Prebble’s plays has been performed here since she brought her debut play Liquid to NSDF when she was a student at Sheffield (who also perform ENRON this time around) in 2002. It is interesting to note the prominence of shows that have been on the West End in recent years
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There is a considerable weight of expectation surrounding withWings given the success of their last show; an unavoidable consequence of returning to NSDF. As a devised piece, and knowing the company’s style, The Duck Pond will no doubt stretch the reinterpretation of an existing work to its furthest realms, and it will be interesting to chart where the Festival’s other shows fall on the scale. Hungry Bitches Productions, who last year brought East London’s hipster scene to the seaside, are back, this time with Americana, an original musical which looks set to add more than a touch of nightmare to the American dream. With the Festival comes the opportunity to refresh and renew works, be they timeless classics or brand new pieces. It is important that NSDF remains as much about reinventing and reinterpreting the established as it is about introducing the original, so that the Festival’s history can continue to influence its future.
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Three of the Best An occasional series in which NOFFers share their pick of the year’s Theatre. Today: Billy Barrett Hamlet
Love and Money
The Worst of Scottee
My highlight of the year so far has to be David Bobbée’s Russian Hamlet at Les Gémeaux in Paris – a watery spectacle in a sex dungeon with Batman capes. A teenagelooking Prince of Denmark was brilliantly moody in the title role, leaping around in skinny jeans and playing with knives. But this Hamlet was also a proper ensemble piece – the perfect antidote to the career-peak, act-wanks we’re used to in Britain. Still, I’ll probably still be lining up for Cumberbatch at the Barbican…
I think I was almost alone in loving Blandine Savetier’s revival of Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money at the Théâtre du Rond-Point last month. Her shouty “ésthétique trash” of broken glass, live electric guitars and fake blood pretty much drowned any human emotion in the text, which left some people cold. After two hours of actors humping piles of cash and licking each other, I certainly didn’t care about dead, handbag-loving Jess – I just felt empty and a bit sick from all the excess. But Kelly’s play is a morality tale of love under latecapitalism; isn’t that the point?
I hadn’t heard much about Scottee, so turned up at his autobiographical solo show The Worst of Scottee expecting no more than entertaining drag. I came out sobered but inspired – too weird for variety but too irreverent for live art, Scottee brings a raw edge back to the “realness” of dressing up. He’s also not afraid to celebrate his flaws, which he does with seductive showiness. He was totally unfazed by the rowdy outdoor festival crowd, whose response was a little less sensitive, than what you’d get with an average “theatre” audience. Another surprise was that I got stung by a wasp. When I told Scottee this a few months later, he said, “I’m glad it was eventful for you.”
Caption Competition Gate Theatre Artistic Director and esteemed NSDF Judge, Christopher Haydon, is no stranger to the NOFFice. Here he is 27 years ago poring over a lovingly prepared issue. Caption suggestions to noff@nsdf.org.uk or @noffmag on the twitters.
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A Total Culture Secretary #2
Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Culture, in his ongoing series about his experiences at NSDF. As told to Richard Dennis. Contains spoilers for Americana. “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” While working at Deutsche Bank during the financial crisis, I discovered that there are three industries which are recession-proof: organised crime, prostitution, and the gays. So it makes me very happy, after my first two days at the NSDFs, to have got a 66% return on my show investment in terms of stories about homosexuals. The pink pound sells, and it’s so heartening to see these young companies with such a keen eye for those markets. Now I know the Conservative Party have had a bit of a bad rep in the past for being “homophobic”, but it was with great pride that I signed into law the gay marriage bill. Why? Because the family that stays together, pays together. We believe in family at the Conservative party, and not just because marriage and the family are the two highest moral goods in the world. There are also some great financial benefits to being married. Take the young couple of Brody and David in Americana, for example. If they’d been married and taken out life insurance, the payout for David upon Brody’s death would have been sizeable. It would certainly have made the mourning process that much more bearable, and he could have retired to that house with the white picket fence he’d always dreamed of (Is this right? -ed.), instead of embarking on his gun-fuelled vengeance. (Although let’s go easy on the Americans, eh guys? I know they have their eccentricities, but we don’t want to ruin that other “special relationship”, do we?) Meanwhile, if Prince Siegfried and Odin had been married in The Duck Pond, Odin would have stood to inherit a small fortune from Siegfried’s aristocratic family upon his death. This money could have
been put into a private portfolio and reinvested. Pretty soon that funfair would have been a nationwide chain of fairs, then a brand, and then, perhaps, a theme park to rival Alton Towers. But, let’s be clear, only under a government that would remove the kind of taxes and bureaucratic red tape that would prevent a magical half-duck/half-man hybrid from making a sound financial return on his investments. Unfortunately, neither show chose to pursue these versions of their stories, which was a missed opportunity. Still, nowadays everyone wants to buy into the gays, and I can’t fault either show for choosing a theme that’s guaranteed to get bums (oops!) on seats. So I give both these shows a AAA credit rating for long-term investment prospects. As a final thought, one thing that both these shows have made clear to me in the past 48-hours is that the NSDFs offer an excellent chance to educate students. Someone else who cared about education was the great Margaret Thatcher (may she rest in peace). Her views on homosexuality are well-known, and I’m sure if she were alive today and leading the newly-branded gay-friendly Conservative Party, she would’ve happily said: “Too often our children don’t get the education they need, the education they deserve. Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being [should be] taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children [who are not taught this] are being cheated of a sound start in life. Yes, cheated.”* *Instead of what she actually said.
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