I was in the minority as regarded Domic Cooke’s earlier Royal Court
production of Bruce Norris’s
The
Pain And The Itch: I wrote in this column in Issue 2007/13, “I
couldn’t for a moment find anything in these gross caricatures to give
me any insight into any actual group or type or tendency of
people. For me, it failed as satire because its target was not
remotely identifiable enough in real-world terms.” On this
occasion, though, I’m waving my pom-poms with the rest of the
cheerleaders... even more vigorously than my
Financial Times other half Sarah
Hemming, in fact.
And it’s because I feel properly indicted by
Clybourne Park. Its mode of
operation often seems flip in the manner of that notorious song from
Avenue Q, “Everyone’s A Little Bit
Racist”; but time and again Norris skilfully strangles our complacent,
self-absolving laughter in our throats, leading to that “half shriek,
half gasp” that David Jays identifies in his
Sunday Times review and which can
be one of the most thrilling responses to hear in a theatre. We
can’t help but shamefacedly identify ourselves with the characters here
displaying their various hypocrisies, avoidances and circumlocutions;
even Quentin Letts, whose reviews so often take aim at a liberal
mentality that he tacitly identifies as other for him and his readers,
has on this occasion written an inclusive review. We all do it;
we’re all guilty.
Uncertainty
It was a strange Edinburgh this year. Strange for me in that, for
the first time in more than 20 years of reviewing there, I decided not
to stay for more or less the entire duration, but scarpered after a
mere two and a half weeks to lie in a darkened room (rather than
sitting in a succession of them) and recover. Yet, although I saw
barely 70 shows compared to my more usual 90–100, somehow the work felt
more intensive than usual. I never really felt I had sufficient
time to stand still and listen to the vibrating antennae of the
Edinburgh community telegraph. Judging by conversations with
colleagues, it hasn’t been such an uncommon feeling. Here was an
uncertainty as to how well things were going this year in comparison to
past Fringes, in either artistic or business terms.
That uncertainty wasn’t helped by the figures released by the Festival
Fringe Society at season-end. Another record number of tickets
sold, they said, some 1.956 million… until it became apparent that
120,000 of these weren’t
sold at
all, but were for the 500+ shows on the various Free Fringes… and
indeed weren’t even a reliable count but simply an estimate… and just
enough to take the total to 100,000 more than the total number of
tickets sold last year. (It’s also noticeable that the elections
to the board of the Fringe Society are no longer held during festival
season, which can surely only depress the number of votes cast and
narrow the range of candidates to within a more or less
self-perpetuating oligarchy.) As for me, I must admit that I
didn’t really miss that third week. I think my middle-ageing
metabolism may finally have naturally slipped down a gear once and for
all, and that I will have joined the majority of colleagues who now
look on it at best as work rather than play, obligation rather than
adventure. We’ll see.
Written
for Theatre Record.