Shangri-la Finborough Theatre - more than just a play

“You like your minorities like your pandas – picturesque, cuddly, endangered, helpless. But I refuse to be a panda. I refuse to go extinct. I want to live, to live well, to live like them.”

More than just a new play,  Shangri-la is a play that connects to issues rarely discussed but that need to be addressed.  It runs at the Finbourough Theatre from 12th July to 5th August.

"Bunny, a young indigenous woman, has witnessed her family’s livelihood destroyed by mass tourism. She dreams of escape — as a globe-trotting photographer. Nelson, her liberal Chinese boss, dreams of a new kind of tourism that's sustainable and enables genuine cultural exchange. Their white Western clients yearn for escape, for the touch of something authentic.........What happens when the only thing you have to sell is your culture? When the only way to free yourself is to betray your roots?"

Does tourism destroy the very culture it seeks to promote ?  Shangri-la is written by Amy Ng who has personal experience of the westernmost regions of China and Tibet. A historian by training (Yale and Oxford), she understands the wider issues  that impact on societies "opened" to western tourism  READ MORE HERE and especially read about the discussion forums that are taking place with the play.

Complicite McBurney Barbican Bulgakov

Anyone who liked Complicite's staging of A Dog's Heart at the ENO might like their latest theatre adventure, this time at the Barbican. Like A Dog's Heart, the drama is based on a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. This time it's his magnum opus, The Master and Margarita. 

The Master and Margarita is a huge, sprawling panorama where time, place and genre keep swapping. One moment we're in the Soviet Union in black and white. Next moment, the screen turns technicolour and we're at a trial in the Middle East where the criminal is Jesus. A mysterious stranger appears. He seems so reasonable. But is he the Devil? He presents as nice old gent,  as a master of ceremonies, the compere of a mad circus and demented fashion show.  Animals and apparitions appear. Then he meets Margarita, a woman so wild even he's flummoxed. For a while.

If anyone's going to be able to stage this within a few hours it's Complicite.  The novel is so off the wall it will be fun to see how they digest it. The show starts 15th March and runs til 7th April. Booking details HERE. Read the novel (it's loooong) or see the Russian TV series. But don't be too literal. This isn't the kind of world where anything is quite what it seems.

Hamlet unseen

So we think we "know" Shakespeare because we were force fed it at school and can quote phrase after phrase (Alas poor Yorick, get thee to a nunnery, etc etc etc). But it's not the same as really experiencing Shakespeare up close. On 18 January there was a very special production at the Questors Theatre in Ealing, west London – Hamlet performed in the way that actors in Shakespeare's own time would have presented it. It was completely different – raw, direct, vital.

In Shakespeare's time, printed texts were limited and few had access to complete scripts. Actors were given their lines with a 3-word cue before each of their speeches. They had no idea who would give their cue or how long the interval would be. They had a short Platt or plot, which gave some detail to stage action and the general direction of the narrative but apart from that they were on their own. In this performance, the cast were called together and sworn not to refresh their memories by reading the play or watching films. As in Shakespeare's time, they didn't rehearse together until an hour before the performance. The result ? Hamlet as a "new" experience, edgy, almost improvisational, but fresh.

What fascinated me was the way it threw focus not on illusion of narrative, but on the very process of acting. Since film, we have pseudo realism aplenty, and forget how much art there is in acting. How does a person enter into the spirit of a character who may be very different from himself ? How does he/she express deeper feelings that might not be in the script but can be intuited from how the part relates to the others ? This cast was alert. listening, thinking, feeling, relating what they were doing to what was happening around them. Some of the acting was so natural that the player seemed transformed into the role. For example, Claudius the King. He's a murderer, yet Simon Thomas, who isn't, makes him a rounded, compelling figure. This King has a history – what went on before the action happened ? He's won the queen's love , and he's crippled with anguish, so he's not a simple bad guy. You want to know him better, how he came to where he is. Similarly, Rachel Power as Queen Gertrude keeps us in suspense – just how much was she culpable ? Her love for her son shines through his "madness". As Hamlet himself, Mark Fitzgerald slipped back into "modern" accent but that was good - his Hamlet is all the more convincing as a contempprary figure. There are many real-life Hamlets around these days, and the dilemma is universal.

In the small theatre, audience and players are so close that there's an extra layer of intimacy. People may only be a metre from each other, but they inhabit different spheres. That's why doing the first three Acts of Hamlet was such an inspired idea : the play within a play reminds us life and artifice interact on many levels. Hamlet is using the troupe to force a reaction from the King and Queen. He's pretending to be mad to lull their suspicions. They don't know what game he's playing. We all read the script at school, but being up close and personal like this is completely different. In this kind of performance, anything can happen : we participate almost as much as the actors do. What a rewarding experience - I enjoyed it so much !