Welcome to post-electric! Plus, a look back at 2023
Welcome to the first issue of Post-Electric, a newsletter about theatre and culture in the age of the profit-driven blackout by me, Adam Goodall. Here you'll find my hopes and intentions for this newsletter; here you'll also find my thoughts on my on-stage highlights for 2023, and the threads tying them together.
Kia ora koutou katoa and welcome to post-electric, a newsletter about theatre and culture in the age of the for-profit blackout.
This is my attempt to connect the melting world we live in (and our hope that we can make it better) with the work that I’m seeing and the voices I’m excited by: a growing collection of reviews and deep dives into theatre and other work from the UK, New Zealand and everywhere else I go.
You can expect a newsletter at least once a fortnight (I’m hesitant to schedule more at this point, because it’s been a long hiatus since I last wrote regularly and I don’t want to over-promise!). The typical schedule will look something like this -
At least two emails a month, responding to work that’s playing now, work that’s already played, and all the sociopolitical faultlines they’re built on. These can range from rapid-response reviews to longer essays months after a show’s run, because I wanna have fun with this!
An end-of-month round-up of what I’ve been watching (and reading and playing and generally feeling things about) and a look ahead at the next month of theatre in London and New Zealand (and potentially, someday, the rest of the world). This’ll be a recommendations round-up, but also a chance to find parallels in the work that’s taking place on the opposite sides of the world and talk about what those mean, if anything.
At some point in the near future, I’m also going to experiment with live-streaming my writing process on my Twitch channel, twitch.tv/daggettVEVO. You’ll find out about what that might look like, and when it’ll happen, in future newsletters.
Before we move forward, though, I want to look back at the year just passed and the shows that I saw, and I want to break down the conversations they sparked - convos with others and convos with myself. I feel like every year since I’ve left high school has been a radicalising year, and this year was more radicalising than most, both in terms of my politics, my understanding of how the world is shaped and who it serves, and in terms of my sense of what theatre and performance can do and can be. I look at Just Stop Oil raiding the stage at Les Miserables as ‘Do You Hear The People Sing?’; I look at the seas of hundreds of thousands strangers on the streets and in Trafalgar Square and on Vauxhall Bridge, united in their songs and chants and messages for a Free Palestine, and it’s hard not to see these as more vital and provocative forms of theatre than anything I paid £20+ to see.
I want this newsletter to be part of a conversation with the work, with the world and with you; I want this to be a crossroads where we can catch up and see what people are saying where I am and where you are. So it seems like the best place to start is with what's just happened - the shows that I responded to this past year, and how it felt like they responded to each other.
Lucy and Friends (@ Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 04/08) is a grimy cabaret freakout about living in one void and screaming into another. Lucy McCormick moves from attention-grabbing transgressions - pissing on stage, attempting to masturbate with a dry, unpeeled carrot - to wilfully stupid punchlines, from howls of loneliness to deranged attempts at connecting with the audience (though I'll always be super-sympathetic to a mass karaoke of Robyn’s Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do). Lucy and Friends is over-easy, the depression and isolation congealing on the top; Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz (@ Summerhall Roundabout, Edinburgh, 07/08) is sunny side up. Nathan Queeley-Dennis’ 7 Days-style story for the inner circle treats the audience as friends rather than witnesses and existential emptiness as something to be met and accepted, rather than screamed at from the rigging. Personally I prefer to be screamed at, and I vibed with Lucy and Friends a lot more (a lot more on that later this month), but both stand at the top of the pile of shows this year interrogating this contemporary crisis of connection.
CREEKSHOW (@ ZOO Southside, Edinburgh, 13/08) and The Flea (@ The Yard, London, 25/11) both have exploitation at the front of their mind. CREEKSHOW explores how capital and industry exploit the land via the story of Deptford Creek, once a crucial part of the city’s port infrastructure and now eyed for luxury 'development'; The Flea surveys the exploitation of the poor and working class through the lens of the Cleveland Street Scandal. CREEKSHOW simmers: performer-essayist Jenny Witzel walks us through Deptford Creek’s history and ecology with an ASMR-ish hush, quietly carrying us from the past to the present and the imminent threat of violent gentrification. The Flea is, in contrast, loud, gaudy and (initially) goofy, a comedy until real life no longer allows for it. Both are brilliantly angry and filled with potent images, from The Flea’s disintegrating haute couture costumes to CREEKSHOW’s moss-covered copies of Titanic on VHS, evocations of the rot at the heart of our economic structures.
So I gravitated towards work that was pretty unequivocal about the grim state of the world, but I also gravitated to optimistic, joyous work about friendship, community and relishing your own power. SKATEPARK (@ Jahrhunderthalle, Bochum, 18/08), choereographed by Mette Ingvartsen, was a gorgeous hybrid of skate and dance, but I came away most excited by its young ensemble’s enthusiasm for each other: it didn’t matter if the little blonde kid was able to ollie over the stack of skateboards, the point was that everyone wanted him to. And in Sound of the Underground (@ Royal Court Theatre, London, 16/02), written by Travis Alabanza and co-created by Debbie Hannan, a first half of parody, polemic and self-interrogation (I’m still thinking about the collection hat and the kind-of-joking-but-not-really comments about how much the cast were getting paid) gave way to an ecstatic second half of people who are really fucking good at what they do monstering that cavernous Royal Court proscenium.
Dark Noon (@ Pleasance EICC, Edinburgh, 06/08) took the myth of the American frontier out back and laid into it with steel-capped boots. It was huge - over the course of the show, the cast of seven South African performers physically erects an entire Wild West outpost - inventive and menacingly funny, setting up wild formal provocations like an on-stage football game before turning them against the audience. For the first half of my time in Edinburgh, I was telling everyone I knew to see this show; for the second half, I was doing this for It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure (@ Underbelly Bristo Square, Edinburgh, 09/08). FlawBored’s satire of modern identity-as-a-brand capitalism - and the able-bodied liberal’s tendency to make accessibility All About Them - thrives in the same kind of ruthlessness. And I was snorting and laughing and gasping my way through it, from the chair-slamming farce of accessibility options that opens the show, to the reveal that the visceral, horrific ‘Modest Proposal’ the play had been building to wasn’t as out-there as its makers thought it would be.
More than anything, what I want from a show is for it to go, Are you tired of being nice? Don’t you just want to go apeshitt? Coz yeah, I fuckn do. All of the shows I’ve talked about ask that question at some level - what about the state of the world doesn't make you want to go apeshitt? But The Talent (@ Battersea Arts Centre, London, 18/05) and Double Goer (@ Dance Base, Edinburgh, 11/08) are pure apeshitt-going, undiluted by coherent narrative or formal conservatism. I came out of Action Hero’s digital haunting feeling like I’d been caught under the waves for an hour, tossed about by its design: phrases delivered over and over again in radio voice until they lose all meaning, a sound box that feels like a modern iron maiden, impossible lighting in an impossible space. And Foster Group Dance’s doppelganger duet was a great time with lots of freaky little sequences, two women with empty hunger in their eyes copying each other and wrestling each other into flesh and screaming into each others’ faces like they enjoy it.
All of the shows I’ve been talking about are inspirational, in the kind of way that any good theatre, any good thing you see or play or read or hear, is inspirational - it opens up new doors in your head and offers you new light. Then there’s The Confessions (@ National Theatre, London, 04/11), written by Alexander Zeldin, and Graceland (@ Royal Court Theatre, London, 06/03), written by Ava Wong Davies. Two thorny tales of entrapment and liberation: one an epic measure of a woman’s life across decades, both small and enormous, the walls moving with her and the cast shifting with her movement; the other an endless cave with the walls closing in, slick and direct and terrifying in the way it compels you physically, eyes on stage, stomach hollowing out. Amazing performances - Sabrina Wu in Graceland especially, tight, controlled, a talent; smart design; tough ideas; aspirational. They took my breath and set a benchmark with it.
This is the first thing I’ve written about theatre in two years (here were the last two things). I’m really enjoying exercising these muscles again, though I won’t deny this took me far longer to get onto paper than I anticipated it would.
That said, I really want Post-Electric to be a live conversation. So if you feel prompted to respond - if you want to talk about parallels in your part of the world, or you want to challenge any old shit I’ve said, or you want to ask questions about something I’ve highlighted or missed - please do! I’d love to open up the space for letters and responses, to write with you through this newsletter.
Similarly, if there’s anything you want to see in the newsletter, or anything that’s not working for you, please just respond to this newsletter. And if you liked it, please share it out! If you liked this email, please share it: You can share it on Twitter or on Facebook.
Thanks for reading! Keep safe, keep well, keep sinewy,
Adam