Is the straight play dying out? Are we seeing the demise of the solo author? I normally avoid such cosmic questions. They remind me of those absurd pieces on “the death of fiction” invariably accompanied by reviews of another bulging batch of new novels. But a recent week on the critical beat led me to wonder if the theatrical ground wasn’t beginning to shift under my feet. Let me explain.

One night I went to see Amato Saltone at Shunt Vaults. This was a weird experience in which the audience was led on a journey through the cellars beneath London Bridge station and confronted by unsettling Hitchcockian images; because we were split into groups, we all had different stories to tell. Next night it was off to Hammersmith for Kneehigh’s Nights at the Circus, a gaudily enjoyable re-creation of Angela Carter’s novel about an angelic aerialiste. Although Tom Morris and Emma Rice are credited with the adaptation, this is basically a company-devised show.

What came next? Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project, which proved to be a visually sophisticated trip into the Montreal wizard’s pysche. After that, I was at the Old Vic for The Soldier’s Tale, a laborious Anglo-Iraqi show in which Stravinsky’s Faustian fable was rendered in both English and Arabic. I also nipped down to The Pit to catch Metamorphoses and Electra, two pieces exuberantly performed by an experimental troupe from Poland’s Gardzienice who have had a big influence on British directors like Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice.

(more…)