Latest news with #experimentaltheatre
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
No President review – surreal Trump satire with ballet shoes and boners
Is this show genius or self-satisfied nonsense? Is it a dadaist farce, scathing political satire or just empty surrealism? One thing's for sure, it is completely Marmite, met with both whoops and walkouts on this London debut. Nature Theater of Oklahoma are in fact an experimental theatre company from New York, and No President, originally made in 2018 (when a certain president was in his first term), involves the following: a pair of security guards protecting a mysterious curtain and whatever is behind it, a love triangle (actually a pentagon), a rival security company in tutus, an insecure man rising to be a Trump-ish despot, and a lot, lot more. It's staged as a 'ballet' inasmuch as the score is Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and the performers wear ballet flats and unitards (with cutesy knitted genitals stuck on top) while dancing their way through the show's two hours, sometimes a bouncy jog, occasionally fouettés. Untrained dancers, like this cast, can bring many qualities to the stage – vulnerability, striving, humanity, joy – but here (at least until the very end) the mode is just lightly comic. The physicality reads like a silent movie, but one with boners, Cheetos, cannibalism and copulating wildlife. It's a mime act accompanied by unceasing narration, a barrage of text delivered at constant pitch and overegged volume, crammed with wordiness ('afflatus', 'feculent', 'kakistocracy') plus some pleasing details (the devil disappearing in a puff of smoke 'that smells like cheddar cheese'), with the result that it's often indigestible. It's clever, sure, packed with a multilayered plot and lots of ideas expressed in cartoonish fashion, whether what drives people to tyranny, or the vagaries of the artist's ego, musing on 'The B-word [boring], the worst insult to any performing artist', and wondering if 'there was no purpose for the drama that's taken place'. Very meta. The onslaught makes it too easy to switch off. Is that the point? That Donald Trump's torrent of nonsense – 'braggadocious verbiage' to quote from the script – ever more outrageous policies, and the hyper-stimulation of wall-to-wall media, has led a society to lose grip on its critical faculties. If so, it's an eccentric way to make it. No President is a wild ride, and a marathon feat for the admirably committed performers. But somehow at the same time, it is also the B-word. At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, until 11 July
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bernie Carroll obituary
My friend Bernie Carroll, who has died aged 75, was an inveterate writer of letters to the Liverpool Echo newspaper, firing off four or five of them each week over a period of about 40 years. He was labelled 'the most opinionated man in Liverpool' by one Echo reporter, and embraced the title with glee. Bernie also made a local name for himself as one of the maverick members of the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, a gathering place for experimental actors, writers, musicians and free-thinkers that was based in an old fruit warehouse during the 1970s. One of his chief partners in mischief there was the actor, director and writer Ken Campbell, and between them they ran the underwater theatre at Liverpool University swimming baths, where performers would go through productions dressed in full costume while breathing through snorkels. Bernie was born in the Wavertree area of Liverpool to James, a civil servant, and his German wife, Marga (nee Theel). He was too much of a mischief-maker and iconoclast to follow his father into desk-bound government work, and after finishing at Skerrys school in the late 60s he worked as a tiler, chef, gardener, bouncer and upholsterer, before setting up his own business drawing, printing and selling postcards and posters. It was in his early 20s that he came into the orbit of the Liverpool School as an artist, street musician and one-man band, and by his 30s he had begun to write to the Liverpool Echo, often on a daily basis. 'When I discovered the letters page I thought 'well, I've got a gripe with society. I'm going to write in every day,' ' he once said. Bernie married Steph Dodds, a fashion designer, in 1994, and she joined him in his postcards and posters business until he began to wind down operations over the past couple of years. He is survived by Steph, a niece, Michelle, and a great-nephew, Jake.
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
No Title (An Experiment) review – Willem Dafoe's return to avant garde theatre is oddly banal
Long before Willem Dafoe became a feted figure of the Hollywood establishment, he was a disrupter, immersed in experimental theatre. On that count, no one can accuse the forces that enlisted Dafoe as Venice Biennale Teatro's artistic director of a cynically celebrity-led appointment. Dafoe's programme expressly reflects the influences and passions that shaped him, not least the Wooster Group, a New York company he co-founded which appears in his Venice lineup. But the risk with this personal nod to the past is that the once-edgy becomes dated experimentalism. That certainly seems the case with this 'experiment', a directorless two-hander in which Dafoe stars alongside Simonetta Solder. Its basis is a series of notes on index cards written by the late American playwright, Richard Foreman – an avant gardist if ever there was one. Dafoe and Solder sit around a table amid a circular mound that is bound by tape, like the cordon at a crime scene. They kick off by drinking a glass of water and smashing it across a heap of broken glass that surrounds them. The suggestion is that the glass has accumulated in an infinitely repeating show, the actors trapped on the island of glass with their index cards. They read them alternately and at quite a pace. Seemingly random thoughts repeat; they are playful, quotidian or profound, and circle around certain themes: time, sleep, shoes. It is less a game of association than a deliberately fragmentary exercise which does not build to a bigger story. Paradoxes crash against each other ('Nasty is nice', 'So tired I woke up', 'Tomorrow comes', 'Tomorrow is yesterday') while homilies turn wonky ('Better never than late', 'Hurt gently', 'Time explains it all'). Dafoe is expressive and relaxed, at least, as well as Solder. 'Language is a bitch,' she says. It sure is here. When the actors switch to speaking in Italian (translated by Matilde Vigna), language really does seem so – for English speakers at least. Is the idea that we, as the audience, begin to create a narrative out of fragments? That the creation of story is irresistible? Whose failure is it if no narrative forms? That question lingers, but in the meantime it is oddly banal. It seems ironic that the title of Dafoe's programme is 'Theatre is body. Body is Theatre'. This feels like conceptual theatre, about ideas not movement, the actors effectively reduced to their voices. In between the index card table tennis is infectiously jazzy music and mischievous polka dot lighting. You hope that Dafoe and Solder will rise and do a jazzy jig. They don't, until taking their final, shimmying bows. As experimental as it may be, it seems old-fashioned in its play with meaning and story, while also hagiographic towards Foreman – a show given over to the reading aloud of his index card scribblings. It calls itself an experiment. It feels more like a puzzle with its dramatic parts, and heart, missing. Part of the Biennale Teatro 2025, which takes place until 15 June. Arifa Akbar's trip was provided by Venice Biennale
