Yorkshire Playwrights member James Waddington reports on FestCEP.02, 14-17 March 2002

For Yorkshire based playwrights the University of Huddersfield's Festival of Contemporary European Plays (FestCEP) was like a new country.

The festival brought together writers, translators and directors from the mainland who told us that British theatre was alive and well, it just wasn't happening in Britain. So pencil FestCEP in for next year - it'll also give you an opportunity too to see Huddersfield's excellent theatre, with its so far underused Attic space.

The festival was divided between chat and performance. There were three `Perspectives`, discussions led by panels, and there were the shows.

In the first Perspective, Contemporary European playwriting, the message of Ian Watson's feature, Sorry, Regional Theatre Is Dead & Buried in Whatsonstage.com, was rather underlined by WYP's Literary Manager, Alex Chisolm, who reminded us again of the irremediable commercial imperative of big spaces, but did not remind us that this imperative produced, as its default position, staged sitcom, soap and spectacle. Alex mentioned the astonishing number of theatre writers she already had on her data base (a hundred, two hundred, I can't remember) and repeated the old Jude Kelly line about pastoral care, though I don't think she quite used the word pastoral. So though she seemed really enthusiastic, not much change there then. On the up side, we have talked for a couple of years about new beginnings in small scale local organisations and spaces, and this was just such a thing. Ian has underlined that in the big regionals, all pretence of looking outwards, upwards, anywhere but towards the box office, in other words, any intellectual and artistic excitement, has gone. I spent four days at FestCEP and I've got more energy and excitement from that lot than from a year of big stage theatre.

And on practical grounds, the message from Europe, from Anslem Heinrich and Sara Soncini, and Alex Chisolm in her director's hat, is that there is work for theatre writers, in Germany and Italy and the Netherlands there are more new UK plays being performed than there are here, a lot more.

But the most important thing about this sort of festival is the shows. As a punter, I was on the look out for theatre, which I would say is something that happens with actors in a space. That's all. When it's not happening, there's something a bit naff and wriggly about actors being actors in a space that is masquerading as a theatrical space, with expensive high tec grid and sound effects. When it does happen, and I'll go straight into cliché here, it takes you to another set of dimensions, and there to existences you didn't know about, and you forget for a moment who you are. That's quite rare.

So there's theatre and there's European theatre. Norman Davies the historian says that Europe is a peninsula of Asia, with a couple of little islands on the end, where we are. So The Isles are part of Europe, and I think to be European is in part, and for the sake of argument , to have a historical apparatus stretched from the Polish Enlightenment to Paris, taking into account that there are no edges with Asia or Africa.

It's also not being American.

In that context, I'll go through the shows and, very simplistically and quickly, wonder how much they are European and/or theatre.

The first was Eva, Hitler's Lover, by Stefan Kolditz. It's a one woman show; Eva reminisces as the Russians approach the bunker. The insights of the piece, beyond the fact that Hitler had a small dick and enjoyed watching a film of his would be assassin hanging from a meat hook, were in the area of how fantasy, notions of film and Hollywood, as well as the Nazi theatrical giantism of rallies and parades, eroticised Hitler. It wasn't a piece that got me very far from where I was already. But it was performed by Fiona Meakin with a sustained versatility that wholly engaged me and rose above the orthodoxy of the text - an actor who could go places.

Eva, Hitler's Lover was necessarily and specifically German. Headsman's Holiday, a Hungarian play by Korél Hamvai, translated by David Robert Evans, and set in revolutionary Paris, should have been benchmark European. In fact to me it seemed rather English. I mentioned this to the translator and he said, `But it clearly takes place in France`. And there's something there that merits further investigation and discussion. Maybe it's a production thing (it could have been Jude Kelly on a low budget, lots of fussy energy, gossips on street corners with their hands on their hips, wagging their heads exaggeratedly, but not a huge amount happening). However the lead, whose name I don't know because Huddersfield democratically only lists the company, was good, somebody who knew how to draw you in just by keeping still, you always knew where his eyes were, where he was looking. There was also some good character acting, so I sat there thinking, there's some good character acting. The play wasn't brilliant - very amusing for the first half hour and then, though more scenes came and went, and there was also a balloon which also came and went, and came and went, nothing much further transpired.

Next, Hugo Carp, by Dodo Gombar, translated by Katarína Slugenová Cockerel. This was reminiscence with added fantasy (there was an angel). To me it was like quite a few childhood reminiscence things, Dennis Potter plays, films where young people do things in the borderland between the sinister and the wonderful ( My Life as a Dog). It was easy-going and involving, there were two good songs (the taller of the two singer/actors, again I don't know her name, has a stunning lower register) and I did feel there was something central European about it - maybe it was the father, when he's rowing with the mother, his threat to burn down the house. It also delivered the Slovak nostrum, `What you cook is what you eat,` which became an exemplar of a certain sort of (I think Sara Soncini later referred to it as context-based rather than target based) translation. Carp also had for me the first moments of theatre in the festival. Again I don't know who the actor was, but he was the druggy friend, he was lying on the ground, bombed out, and he began to speak in a distant, sepulchre-lite sort of way; I have no recollection of what it was about, but - suddenly, theatre. And he did it again, when he came to borrow money from Hugo (excellent anchor man) which was code for dying. It was for those seconds very moving and sad, it was all in his voice and in his body, which looked as if it was still walking, but with the articulation of the already dead.

4:48 Psychosis was done as a controlled physical piece. People who knew said that Sarah Kane is the most performed contemporary playwright in Europe - Sara Soncini also said that in Italy, where director's theatre dominates, they preferred working with writers who were dead and couldn't interfere. 4:48 Psychosis was done by final year University of Huddersfield students. Horrific experiences (battle, burning) produce flashbacks, and so does this for me, images of mad faces, isolation, and the self-probing of a merciless intelligence - as well as clinical manic depression. The Actors subjugated themselves entirely to the form, and I think that is the only way it could have worked. This was a piece, a very frightening piece, where actually every aspect was subjugated to the whole, lighting, choreography, speech. If it had been the only thing in the festival, the festival would have been worthwhile.

It wasn't the only thing. The Dybbuk by Julia Pascal also had a cast who drove all their energy inwards, towards stillness and slow movement. The set was grey, their suticases were grey, their eyes were staring, there was a sliding steel gate, a wall with razor wire above, the head and collar of a guard above the razor wire. The first few minutes were a succession of tableaux, dark, alteration, dark, alteration, and then the people, they could be Bosnians, Rwandans, all subsumed by the yellow stars they wore. Theatre again, maybe the most powerful opening minutes I have ever seen. I'm not sure that Julia Pascal's play is perfect. The story of the two brothers and The Dybbuk didn't work for me, it seemed internally messy and, though I could see what it was structurally, it didn't resonate, or mesh, or whatever such a story does, with the situation of German Jews on the way to death. But the piece as a whole was much bigger than that, to my mind, weakness. I felt before it started, can anything more be got from this, from the residues of the Holocaust? The answer came back, Yes. This play, in this production, needs to be seen in more places.

Cesario Augusto Piementel de Alencar is an actor of huge ability, who is also an acrobat and a clown. The Non-Existent Knight was a wonderful piece. Can theatre shock? There's always something, at one point he was on his back and blew a dumbbell of yellow snot, I didn't see where it came from, his mouth or his nose, which landed on his face, he slid to his feet as if gravity was upside down, scooped the phlegm onto his finger tip, shoved deep into his mouth, and then went into a whining and obsequious apology for his disgustingness. He was anybody, king, knight, beggar, computerised bureaucrat of mass killing. The piece was too long, because it ran out of energy with about 15 minutes to go. He's not the kind of actor who needs to spin once to signify that he has changed roles. For me a character (or is it a role) with his hair over his face who intones in a hollow voice becomes quickly a blank in time. I think he needs a director. But this piece is wonderful. It cover's the ground of a Hijra in ten seconds and to forty times the depth. There are some actors who have too much ability to be fully manageable, the line between genius and isolation. Piementel de Alencar communicates from isolation, manic human figures in a huge and lonely historical space.

In the end I come back to European theatre, and to the absence of intellectual or artistic excitement in so many English main stage productions. You can judge a word by its usage. Art has a wide span. In cinema, art-house means big diversity, evolution of technique, ethical probing, wide emotional and cultural range; but in theatre, when artistic directors and chief executives talk of art, you quickly look around to see if you're in `the more they spoke of their honour, the more we counted the spoons` territory. Nobody at FestCEP spoke much about art, but there were stirrings, emergences, the kinds of things you find in the best contemporary cinema, only rarely in the theatre. We should keep with it.



James Waddington is a playwright whose novel, Bad to the Bone, is published by Dedalus.