11 and 12
Barbican, until 27 February
A Life In Three Acts: Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill
Soho, until 27 February
Peter Brook, the world’s most maddening theatre director, returns to London with an adaptation of a novel set in the French colony of Mali in west Africa. Brook is never as bad as his critics hope nor as good as his fans dream. So he always disappoints somebody. 11 and 12 tells of a schism within an oppressed Muslim sect. Some worshippers recite 11 verses of a certain prayer, others 12. The tiff intensifies and the French authorities order a crackdown. This dispute neatly encapsulates the seismic pettiness of religious controversies but the bust-up isn’t pursued very far.
Preferring discussion to spectacle, the play settles into a lugubrious strain of superficial profundity and much of the dialogue sounds like a bereavement card. (The full moon, we’re told, is the eternal symbol of truth.) The characters are both threadbare and immutable. The French are thugs in braid and epaulettes, the Africans are saintly geniuses in Old Testament hermitwear. The ‘action’ is accompanied throughout by atmospheric plinkings and plonkings, bangings and bongings, warbly dibble-dobbles and dawbly wibble-wobbles. These are provided, from the side of the stage, by a fair-trade Chinaman who sits cross-legged in aikido pyjamas scraping away at a selection of those ethnic stringed instruments which remind one rather tragically of evening classes.
Occasionally something good surfaces. ‘What is God?’ asks an acolyte. ‘The embarrassment of the human mind,’ says his teacher. ‘Asserting his existence doesn’t help you, materially or scientifically, to prove it. Denying it seems a denial of your own existence. Yet you exist.’ Plenty of meat there but it’s a rare find in a very runny soup. The sage teacher, now imprisoned, is challenged by the governor to make Allah bash his brains in. The teacher declines, sagely, but a few days later the governor’s brains are indeed bashed in during a road accident. Nice touch. Later, the replacement governor calls in the sage for a second grilling. This repetition is artless and wasteful. There’s no escalation, and no momentum, in this play. More importantly, neither interrogation scene surpasses its original: the encounters between Pilate and Christ in the gospel. A writer who steals must also improve. It’s perilous to plagiarise greatness. That’s why shrewd artists borrow from inferior sources. The show’s best feature is its stark and beautifully phrased design. Long red mats on a black floor scattered with vibrant yellow sandpaths create pools of lateral colour varied by three plain upright tree trunks. That is truly lovely. But you can get the full effect in one minute. The play lasts a hundred.
Since the death of Quentin Crisp there’s been a Crisp-shaped hole in gay society. The throne of the martyr-survivor is now occupied by a 70-year-old drag artist named Bette Bourne. She has the scars, the stories, and the mascara to prove her service record, and she recounts her war stories to adoring liberated young gay crowds. This isn’t theatre but a Dolly mixture of documentary, reminiscence and cabaret presented in a rather odd chat-show format. Bourne and his collaborator Mark Ravenhill read from scripts. This makes the pretence of improvisation look forced and Ravenhill has to keep gawping in amused disbelief at punchlines he’s heard dozens of times.
And there’s an Elvis fallacy here, an assumption that every scrap of Bourne bric-a-brac, even the overhead projector showing uncaptioned photos of old friends, is automatically fascinating. Neutrals like me will be interested in the origins of the Gay Pride march. In the early Seventies cross-dressers would gather in impromptu mobs and swan around London in numbers sufficiently large to deter the attacks a solo promenade invariably attracted. This is why Gay Pride deserves our esteem. It’s not just a bunch of bodybuilders in fishnets blocking traffic while being poofy. It asserts a key liberal doctrine. The right to tights and ribbons is as fundamental as the right to free speech. Well, nearly.
Before becoming a militant hero, Bourne toured Europe and America with her epic spoofs, Lust in Space and Get Hur! She can still turn it on as an artiste. She sings jazz and blues. She does a bit of Lady Bracknell. She can manage a few rickety tap steps and, because of her age, this elicits the sort of sly applause we bestow on pre-school tots singing ‘Away in a Manger’. Her best routine is a Cockney tart remembering her husbands. ‘The first was a gynaecologist. He just looked at it. The second was a psychiatrist. He just talked to it. The third was a stamp-collector. I do miss him.’
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