mike bartlett

You are currently browsing articles tagged mike bartlett.

The Orchard Project, day 4- writing ‘Thrown’ with Mike Bartlett

June 12, 2009 in Music, Theatre | Please leave a comment

Mike Bartlett & I are on a writing retreat, working on Thrown, a play-with-music for the Royal Court.  It will have two rehearsed readings as part of the Court’s Rough Cuts season, for which you can buy tickets here.  Mike’s new play, Cock, opens at the Royal Court on 13th November 2009.

If you’re a regular reader of my thoughts [Hi mum!] you might have read that I’m not a big fan of musical theatre. However, as someone who both writes music and plays, I’m well aware of the power in both artforms; this all came to a head around a year ago, when Mike Bartlett asked me to collaborate on a play he was writing, called Thrown; it was still in development then (as it is now), and he was also interested in finding ways to allow dramatic action and music to interact and inform each other, without ending up with what we both perceived as the superficiality of musical theatre.

In true socialist fashion, the first thing that I did was to write A Manifesto.  As with nearly everything that sets itself up in opposition to something else, it’s a flawed statement of intent, but it did succeed in fixing a lot of the thoughts that we wanted to work on.  What with the usually hurried process of rehearsing for a reading, we had a limited time to get things together, and lots of my/our high-faluting ideas had to be left by the wayside, in order to get something performable ready in a couple of days.

So, fast forwarding to now- Mike and I are now in the town of Hunter, NY in the Catskill Mountains, courtesy of The Orchard Project and the Royal Court Theatre.  We’re here to work on the project some more and, in particular, make our links between the musical and theatrical elements clearer, bringing in some of the manifesto thoughts that we’d had to leave out of the play’s earlier incarnation.

What we’re striving for, while we’re here, is a piece of work in which the form and content inform each other- there should be a dialogue between the narrative of the play, and the structure we’re creating in order to tell that story.

Prior to coming here, I was a little baffled as to why the Court thought it was a good idea to send two English people, writing a play about England, and living within a 1 hour bus ride of each other, off to the Catskill Mountains, at great cost and inconvenience.  Having been here for a few days, though, it seems clear: what The Orchard Project have is a large number of artists in a small area, for a short period of time, all of whom are keen to talk about their practice, and to learn from the experiences of others.  Late-night discussions have become a commonplace, and it’s clear that there are a lot of extremely passionate theatremakers coming up through the colleges and universities.  I don’t think Mike and I would have been able to do the work we have so far, had we not been in this environment. It really is good not to have to be in London, sometimes.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say while I’m here; in particular, I’d like to talk a little more about how Mike and I are working on the play.  If, god forbid, you happen to have any questions about any of this, please do leave a comment and I’ll answer as fully as I can.

So, the Royal Court Theatre are sending me to New York…

June 1, 2009 in Music, Theatre | Please leave a comment

As it sounds: The Royal Court Theatre (of Sloane Square, London) are sending me, and playwright Mike Bartlett, off to a theatrical retreat in the Catskill Mountains in the north of New York State, so that we can work on a play together.

I’m not making this up.

Questions are arising in your mind, I imagine.  Questions like ‘Why are they sending you to New York, when you both live in London?’ and ‘Why now, when the project had seemed to be dead?’ and ‘How fucking lucky can you be?’.  I don’t know the answer to these questions, dear reader.  What I can tell you is that I’m going to be spending a lot of time writing music alongside Mike’s script, and that I’ll be taking lots of photos of a mountain, and quite possibly writing a lot of blogs about how totally sweet it is being up a mountain while you’re fed and watered and just expected to come up with some art.

It’s a hard life, eh?

Why Musical Theatre is shit.

August 7, 2008 in Music, Theatre | 9 comments

Mike Bartlett & I are, intermittently, working on a project together, involving music by me and words by him; we’ve already performed a short version of the piece at the Royal Court, who seem to be enthusiastic about our taking it further. As part of the preparations for this, I wrote a little bit about why I cannot stand Musicals and, a little later, went on to set out a manifesto for a different way of combining music & theatre.

In a small way, I’m a musician, composer and playwright; I love theatre, and I love music. This is why I despise Musical Theatre. Musicals are an affront to anyone who cares one iota about the impact that theatre or music can have. They can never express anything deeper than the purely superficial, and can’t show anything interesting about the world. Here’s a, far-from-exhaustive, selection of reasons why:

• The music is always trite, cliché-ridden, cheap and emotionally manipulative, and the narrative likewise.

• No emotion is ever expressed that can’t be summed up in a rhyming couplet.

• The entire premise is inconsistent- the idea of naturalistic acting being interrupted by a band, and by breaking into song, is an incoherent mess of a structure.

• The idea that, as emotional intensity increases, the only way to express oneself is through song is flawed. a) people don’t become more expressive as they become more emotional; if anything, it’s the opposite. b) any attempt to become more eloquent through music is immediately frustrated by the need for rhyme, rhythm, singing range etc, which confines rather than liberates the character & performer.

• Singing well is hard. Acting well is hard. Finding one person who can do both these things is very, very hard. Finding a cast who can do both very well is nigh on impossible.

• Musicals are expensive, and thus have to make a lot of money to make it worthwhile; this means appealing to as many people as possible, challenging nothing and offering a cheap emotional sop to all.

• Part of this need to make money results in the need to make something showy, glitzy and gaudy which, patently, the world is not.

• Music, sound and song are never the product of the world they’re in- they come from some out-of-world decision that “we need some song here”, not from an in-world activity or emotion. The music is just layered on top of the narrative.

• There’s no dialogue between the forms- one of the signs of something’s artistic worth is that the form and content inform each other. In the creation of the work, they should be considered equally; there should be a dialogue and interrogation between them that explains their relationship. In Musical Theatre very little, if anything, makes the musical and theatrical elements a cohesive whole.

• “Hummable tunes”, easily achieved emotional gratification, a plot simply designed to string pop songs together, music and narrative composed by lumping together populist clichéd tropes like Lego blocks- these are fucking anathema.