2017 Top Eight
I’ll come clean: I’ve hardly actually seen any theatre this year. Relatively speaking I mean. So the fact this list is shorter than average says much more about my year than theatre’s. Part of me feels like it’s a bit of a shame — all the things I’ve missed that should be featured here. But then, fucking hell, would you look at these ABSOLUTE BANGERS.
Jubilee
The spirit of punk lives on in queer clubs and performance art, but if you live your life with integrity all art is redundant anyway. I adored this show. And I felt completely skewered by it — my white, cishet, middle-class theatre bullshit exposed and ridiculed. I’ve never felt so uncool and I can’t wait to see it again.
Re-Member Me
Dickie Beau’s exploration of past Hamlets was kinda like a documentary podcast which included some shuffling about, and then it landed on the story of Ian Charleson, whose portrayal of THE DANE was one of his last roles before he died of AIDS. Dickie Beau’s normal thing is to channel his subjects in this totally incredible, uncanny way, but here it’s more like it all comes together in the edit, like the sum is greater than the parts — we get fleeting impressions of Charleson, appearing like a ghost.
Anatomy of a Suicide
Still not really sure I’m ready to talk about this tbh. It felt like it scooped me out. Half of me wanted to stare out of a nearby window and listen to Tracy Chapman while silently crying, the other half wanted to take a crossbow to everyone who even suggested it wasn’t a work of staggering genius. I will ride into battle for Alice Birch, 100%.
An Octoroon
The blackface/whiteface/redface thing still feels so shocking that I even can’t bring myself to have one of those images on this post, and I realise this play is not unproblematic — people of colour in the audience have felt erased by the assumptions it makes of theatregoers — but it still represented something really exciting I think: a play which spoke back to history in the language of today, which reactivated and repoliticised a tired theatrical form for contemporary times, but which also showed us how far we still have to go.
Becoming An Image
This was like a religious experience. I knew it would be. What I didn’t expect was exactly what weird tricks my eyes and brain would play on me. So, Cassils beats this massive mound of clay to bits, and the only lighting is the flash of a photographer’s bulb — which I knew all about before I got there — but it’s not like what you see is like a photo, oh no. Your retina creates this silhouette, flashing and fading, which kinda shimmers. I found myself darting my eyes around my heard, searching for the disappearing image, so much so that the next time the camera flashed I’d be turned in almost entirely the wrong direction and Cassils would just be this single arm or leg protruding into my field of vision. It was out of this fucking world.
Wild Bore
A show about how theatre critics talk shit. With angry feminist politics. And bums. Basically perfect.
Roman Tragedies
Yeah, yeah, I know. Predictable hipster Europhile bullshit. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t sit myself in some daft spaces where I missed important stuff, and I didn’t have any money for the cafe bit so I got starving hungry, and I still fucking hate Shakespeare, so this was a real experience. Nothing else like it.
Girl From The North Country
Well this was a surprise. I only went because I had an illicit discount code. But even while the story was a bit of a cut-and-shut job, and Bob Dylan only has about 5 good songs, they created something that was so evocative, and so fucking magical, it was like time has been suspended. Shirley Henderson was this ageless wisdom-child, somehow tying us all together with twine — 1930s, 1960s, 2017.
