I've been to see seven plays in the last ten days, more through coincidence than deliberate design. In six of those shows I enjoyed what I consider to be the essential quality of drama -- the interaction between characters. This is the common factor that links Everyman, Measure for Measure, Clarion, A View From The Bridge, The Nether and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.
Number seven was a widely praised production of a new play in which there is no interaction between the characters, and I didn't enjoy it at all. To be honest, Simon Stephens' Carmen Disruption at the Almeida bored the pants off me and I was desperately checking my watch to see when it would end. The last time I got that feeling was my trip to Richmond in December to see Pomona.
Because reviewers I take seriously -- Michael Billington, Lyn Gardner and Susannah Clapp -- have all raved about this production, I've been trying to work out why they loved it and I hated it. It's very loosely based on Bizet's Carmen, but the links are so tenuous that they extend no further than a few musical nods and the presence on stage of a real mezzo-soprano. The Bizet has gone out with the bathwater, which scarcely matters to me. I'm generally in favour of reinventing the classics, and Bizet, like Shakespeare, is big enough to look after himself.
Stephens' reinvention means that Carmen is a rent-boy (very well played by Jack Farthing), Micaela is a suicidal student, Escamillo is a dodgy global financier, and Don Jose is a female taxi driver. The cast also includes a globe-trotting singer who jets around with her suitcase from one opera house to the next to sing Carmen. At this point I should mention the presence of a gigantic dead bull at the front of the stage, its hooves facing the audience. On the way in to the theatre we have to cross the stage and walk past it to our seats.
The problem with the play doesn't lie in the reinvention of the characters, still less in their gender-swapping. Nor do I have any issue with breaking the artificial barrier between front-of-house and backstage. The moment I started to ask 'Where's the beef?' was when it became clear to me that none of the characters was going to speak to each other, only directly to us. To me, theatre is a triangle in which actors play to each other and to the audience. Take away one side of that triangle, and you are left with a series of disconnected monologues.
Because the play's theme is alienation and disconnection, Stephens cannot allow any of his characters to interact. This is a real dramatic problem, made worse by the fact that the individual monologues are mostly quite banal. There's a lot of backstory and not much action, more tell than show. I felt much the same about Stephens' play Harper Regan a few years ago -- isolation and alienation aren't easy to turn into drama.
After about half an hour of this production, my attention started to wander and I began to focus on the dead bull. I could see its hooves moving imperceptibly. I looked more closely and wrote in my notebook: 'The bull is breathing!' I began to hope it might suddenly rise up and chase the actors off stage, which would have been a terrific coup de theatre. When nothing happened I started to feel rather sorry for the poor stagehand trapped inside, whose job turned out to be to release a flood of nasty bloody goo on to the stage in the last ten minutes.
Stephens' most successful piece of writing is his adaptation for the National Theatre of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I admired greatly. The boy at the centre of the story is deeply alienated by his autistic personality, but his struggle to interact with the rest of the characters creates an utterly absorbing story.
According to the programme notes, he seems to have got his original inspiration for Carmen Disruption from his complicated relationship with his iPhone. Like the author of Pomona, he is 'getting his anxieties out and putting them on the floor'. His decision to use the Carmen story came later. His other theme is Europe, and 'the extent to which European cities are coming to ghost or echo one another'.
Well, that's true to some extent. If you spend your time in airports and four-star hotels, they're all the same. But it's the writer's job to drill beneath the surface of that homogeneity and find what is specific. I don't mean local colour, which isn't essential for making good theatre. I'm thinking here of the way Ivo van Hove ruthlessly strips away all details of time and place in his production of A View From The Bridge, leaving just the interaction between the characters.
In general I'm a big fan of the Almeida (not just because it's the only London theatre that invites bloggers to review its shows). I like Rupert Goold's stop-at-nothing high-wire approach to making theatre, and the fact that he avoids the safe and easy options as artistic director. He's right to keep posing questions about what makes a play into a play. But if the future of stage drama is going to look like Carmen Disruption, then I won't be making that particular journey. It's a load of dead bull.