Helpful information? Or did they just worship the mysterious, the unknown and the notorious?

I hadn’t worked in the theatre for a long time, when two years ago I decided enough was enough and took off towards my own unknown. I quit my office job, packed a change of clothes into a rucksack, left my phone and I-pod on the kitchen table and got on a plane leaving England for France.

From France I walked all the way across Spain, to finish on the west coast where the land meets the sea. It took me forty days and forty nights (and if that isn’t true, it should be.)

At the sea I had a choice – to return to my office job, spend all my time there each day, buy a sandwich at lunch, be allowed one tea break in the morning, one in the afternoon.

Or I could choose to spend as much time as possible doing what I love – writing plays. I hadn’t been involved in making theatre for three years. I looked at the map. ‘Here be monsters’ it said.

Scary as it was, I made the choice to return to a career writing plays. I stepped into unknown territory seeking liberation, with a smile on my face and an optimism bordering on insanity. Let there be monsters I thought. Let there be fear.

At the Drachengasse Theatre in Vienna, starting on May 3^rd, will be the play I wrote for the directors of Imploding Fictions. It is called ‘Flap and Fear’.

It involves Lilly and Jesse, two pigeons who go on holiday to Vienna.

You know the way pigeons gather in the park? Then if you move close to them, they flap their wings in fright and fly away? What happens next?

They always come back.

Pigeons returning to the crust of bread in the park and me returning to pursue a career in playwrighting are the same thing. They are stories about the addiction we have to our fears. The compulsion, the obsession to test, sample, discover how close we can get to the fire before we burn our hand.

‘Here Be Monsters’ the map says.

Curious, we keep going to have a look.

- Darren Lerigo, april 2010

***

Guest-blogger Darren Lerigo is a Madrid-based playwright and theatremaker. He has written Imploding Fictions’ latest play “Flap and fear” which will be performed as part of the Newcomer-scheme at Theater Drachengasse in Vienna 3rd – 22nd May 2010.

Oslo International Theatre presents the Norwegian premiere of

Attempts on Her Life

by Martin Crimp

a rehearsed reading at Vardeteatret in Oslo

Translated by: Katharina Gellein Viken

Directed by: Øystein Ulsberg Brager

With: Katharina Gellein Viken, Christoffer Hag Maure, Robert Rustad Amundsen og Torgny G. Aanderaa

Produced by: Michael H. Sciarrone

Thursday 11th March at 7pm at Vardeteatret, Rådhusgt. 19 in Oslo, Norway

Tickets can be reservered via oslointernasjonaleteater@gmail.com

Attempts on Her Life is a modern masterpiece by British dramatist Martin Crimp.

When it burst onto stage in 1997 at London’s Royal Court theatre it created both immense excitement and considerable bafflement. It’s the work of a freewheeling imagination in which seventeen scenarios collide to create the portrait of a highly ambiguous character called ‘Anne’. With each scenario we are presented with a different facet of her enigma. Is she a porn star, an international terrorist, a victim of aliens, a physicist or indeed a make of car? Martin Crimp presents us with all these options in this virtuosic tour de force of a play which is by turns funny, shocking, entertaining and sad. More than a decade after its’ premiere Attempts on Her Life has become an established modern classic and a major influence on young writers the world over. OIT is proud to present the first reading of this extraordinary piece in Norway in a brand new translation by Katharina Gellein Viken.

Welcome to Attempts on Her Life!

Philip Thorne

Joint artistic director of Imploding Fictions and dramaturg for Oslo International Teater

About Crimp and Attempts on Her Life:

The most radically interrogative play in western mainstream theatre since Beckett.

Mary Luckhurst

The piece has a kaleidoscopic vigour … It is driven by a radical contempt for the new global capitalism and its attempt to turn us all into peripatetic, depersonalised consumers … He may have dispensed with plot and characters,  but he has proved that the act of theatre can still survive if it is propelled by moral fervour.

Michael Billington, Guardian

This is what the brave new theatre of the 21st Century will look like – both on stage and on the page.

Nicholas de Jongh

[Crimp] has an extraordinary fastidiousness about language … He displays the formal bravura of one who delights in his craft.

Independent on Sunday (om Crimps The Country)

Martin Crimp is one of the hottest properties in Europe.

Guardian

For more information on OIT see:

http://oslointernasjonaleteater.wordpress.com

Oslo International Theatre is a project run by Imploding Fictions:

www.implodingfictions.com

Attempts on her Life by Martin Crimp was first presented by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre.

Publisher: Nordiska ApS

Photo from OITs reading of Seven Other Children by Richard Stirling. From the left: Sveinung Oppegaard and Torgny G. Aanderaa. Copyright: Michael H. Sciarrone

- Oystein

Hannah, Sammy and the two Hamletmachine robots, photo: Tamás Kiraly

We come straight from another two successful Hamletmachine performances at the lovely Théâtre la Vignette in Montpellier, to a completely new departure in Oslo: We are starting Oslo International Theatre (OIT), our first big project in Norway. Below you find an invitation (both in Norwegian and English) to our very first rehearsed reading. We hope to see you there!

INVITASJON

Oslo Internasjonale Teater inviterer til iscenesatt lesning av

Sju Jødiske Barn av Caryl Churchill og Sju Andre Barn av Richard Stirling

med påfølgende paneldebatt

Tid: 12. november klokken 19:00

Sted: Vardeteatret, Rådhusgata 19, Oslo

Pris: Fri entré, innsamling til inntekt for Medical Aid for Palestinians og One Voice Movement

Medvirkende: Terje Skonseng Naudeer, Thea Borring Lande, Sveinung Oppegaard, Torgny Aanderaa, Ingrid Askvik og Tor Itai Keilen

Regi: Øystein Ulsberg Brager

OIT presenterer Sju Jødiske Barn av Caryl Churchill og Sju Andre Barn av Richard Stirling med påfølgende paneldebatt, og stiller spørsmålet: Hvilken rolle kan dramatikken spille i forhold til konfliktsituasjoner verden over? Deltagere i panelet er blant annet Gunnar Germundson fra Dramatikerforbundet og litteraturviter Rana Issa. Dramaturg Njål Mjøs leder debatten. Det er fri entré, og OIT vil etter dramatikernes ønske samle inn penger som deles likt mellom Medical Aid for Palestine og One Voice Movement.

Det er begrenset med publikumskapasitet, så hvis du ønsker å sikre plass er det mulig å sende epost med navn og antall publikumere til: oslointernasjonaleteater@gmail.com

Vi vil etterhvert opprette en egen mailingliste for OIT som kun omhandler våre arrangementer i Norge. Om du ønsker å stå på denne er det hyggelig om du sender en email med «Påmelding OIT nyhetsbrev» i emnefeltet til: oslointernasjonaleteater@gmail.com

Mer info finnes på http://oslointernasjonaleteater.wordpress.com

Vi håper du kan komme torsdag 12. november!

Hamletmachine in Montpellier, photo: Tamás Kiraly

INVITATION

Oslo International Theatre invites you to a rehearsed reading of

Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill and Seven Other Children by Richard Stirling with a following panel debate

When: 12th November at 7pm

Where: Vardeteatret, Rådhusgata 19, Oslo, Norway

Entry: Free, a collection is made for Medical Aid for Palestinians and One Voice Movement

Cast: Terje Skonseng Naudeer, Thea Borring Lande, Sveinung Oppegaard, Torgny Aanderaa, Ingrid Askvik and Tor Itai Keilen

Directed by: Oystein Ulsberg Brager

The reading will take place in Norwegian.

OIT presents Seven Jewish Children Caryl Churchill and Seven Other Children by Richard Stirling with a following panel debate. We ask the question: What role can the theatre play in relation to areas of conflict around the world? Amongst others the leader of the Norwegian Playwrights’ Organisation, Gunnar Germundson, and fellow of the University of Marburg, Rana Issa, will participate in the debate, which will be moderated by dramaturg Njål Mjøs. Entry is free, and a collection will be made benefitting Medical Aid for Palestinians and One Voice Movement equally.

Audience numbers are limited, so if you wish to reserve a seat please send us an email with your name and the number of people to oslointernasjonaleteater@gmail.com.

For more info see http://oslointernasjonaleteater.wordpress.com

Welcome!

- Oystein

Company of Angels presents Sense at Southwark Playhouse

From 28th April to the 2nd May

This is not an Imploding Fictions production, but is produced by our good friends and collegues at Company of Angels. Oystein is directing “Nose”, one of the 5 pieces:

Following on from the play’s success at Theatre Café Festival 2008, five Company of Angels’ Associates will jointly be directing a promenade production of the award-winning Sense by German author Anja Hilling with a cast of 10 final year Drama Centre students.

Sense is a series of interlinking narratives. All five ‘senses’ are also plays in their own right. A play about teenagers, love, and the need to make radical choices, Sense is an intense, poetic journey into touching, inhaling, tasting, hearing, seeing and experiencing life to the extreme.

“astonishingly grown-up and hard-hitting theatre for young people”
Lyn Gardner – The Guardian, on Theatre Cafe 2008

Tickets can be booked from:
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
or 020 7407 0234

Or read more on:
www.companyofangels.co.uk

Hope to see you all there!

- Oystein

Imploding Fictions 
CO/Oystein Ulsberg Brager
24 Bay Tree Close
Sidcup
Kent DA15 8WH

- Øystein and Pip

Apart from all the usual productions of Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm and so forth, this year’s Ibsen Festival in Oslo also features Ibsen performed by little plasticine figures…

The theatre designer Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens travelled to visit kids between 14 and 16 at several Norwegian schools. She boiled down classic Ibsen plots into one sentence (“Girl kills herself although she has everything”, “Mother leaves husband and kids” etc.) and gave them to the teenagers as a narrative starting point. Equipped with a video camera and plasticine the teenagers set about creating, modelling and filming their own stories derived from these premises. Inger didn’t mention the Ibsen plays, so the pupils created without any preconceptions. They modelled their own version of events…

The resulting films are being shown for the duration of the festival in the National Theatre’s foyer, and Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens screened them at the Open Theatre (Det Apne Teater) as part of a performance lecture entitled Bloody Dramatic Rooms.

Inside little cardboard boxes, lovingly decorated as affluent living rooms with widescreen TVs fashioned out of match boxes, wild fantasies of domestic violence, abuse and addiction take place. It’s revealing that all but three of the fifteen groups (despite complete freedom) decided to stage their dramas in domestic living rooms. The pent up tension of these claustrophobic shoe box homes is in fact quite reminiscent of Ibsen. The way the tension is unleashed though is quite different… There is an abundance of violent humour and graphic detail. The ramshackle plasticine film making is boundless in terms of ambition. In my favourite film for example Nora’s modern-day plasticine husband hacks his way out of the doll’s house with a chain saw. Although most of the scenarios at some point spiral out of control into gratuitous gore, the films are filled with insights into these pupils’ world views and how they perceive “family.” What is starkly obvious is the extent in which TV pervades every aspect of their domestic lives. A TV is featured in every one of the dramatic rooms, as are fathers complaining “you’re in front of the screen” and “shut up, I can’t hear it!” It seems that family life without the TV set has become unthinkable. But it’s not just a physical presence in these films, the vocabulary of TV can be sensed in the making of them. The creators are obviously highly visually literate. They also have an eye for lurid detail and a taste for violent humour. Whilst watching I sometimes think these films are more in reference to movies these kids have seen or series they admire, rather than their own lives in well to do, rural Norway. The “Lady from the sea” film can best be described as Beavis and Butthead meets Ibsen.

So, are these films about Norwegian families, or American families, or how Norwegian teenagers see American families or an assemblage of all the things they fear, idolise or identify with? Whatever the answer (and it’s probably a mixture of all these things) these tiny films seem both harsh and at the same time quite vulnerable. They make for fascinating viewing!

They also seem to suggest that directors confronted with the staging difficulties of say Brand or Peer Gynt should maybe get themselves a handful of play-do : )

Philip Thorne

Well. It’s probably not quite broken. It’s not removed at the hip. It’s not crushed and jelly-like. It doesn’t even have white bits of bone sticking out. So in that sense, the whole business is disappointingly un-dramatic. But the doctors say Pip’s leg is fractured and that he should rest for a while and not use it. So we have been forced to quit rehearsals and cancel the project.
This means we are not going to Amsterdam, not previewing in Oslo, not visiting the Ukraine, not currently planning another Rome-trip and not going to get the opportunity to take this particular project any further. Which is sad, of course. But life goes on and all that.

Then. When the cloud of disappointment had subsided, the thick layers of irony hit us. Like a slap in the face with a big fish.

Here we embark on a journey trying to make a show about failure. And fail.
We make a show about clowns. And Pip performs the perfect act of slapstick on the staircase outside where we’re rehearsing.
We set about creating a slippery landscape of tricks and fiction and end up physically slipping up.

In fact, we called our show Now You See It; Now You Don’t. And for a long time we could see it looming in the distance. Unclear, slightly out of focus maybe, but full of promise and bright colours and joke shop props and touring plans. Now, we can’t see it anymore. The show is off radar, it has entered the Bermuda triangle of theatre only reappearing like a ghost of memory – like the Flying Dutchman, perhaps, its journey interrupted, but its trajectory forever Amsterdam-bound… (How’s that for a syrupy analogy?)

We were making a show about what we laugh at and why, how we make something un-funny, funny. And it is with all this in mind that we suspect that this whole situation might in fact be a perfectly legitimate laughing matter. It is funny that this whole thing went tits up. Or leg down, as the case may be. We are waiting for the pain to recede – or, Pip is, I’m fit as a fiddle to be frank, waiting for the aftermath of cancellations to quieten down before we make our mind up about this. The laugh-worthy-ness of our current unfortune – does it deserve a five star rating or a meagre two?

But in the end I guess it is to be expected. Not Philip falling down stairs, of course (Well, maybe that too…). What I mean is: When you have the nerve to call your company Imploding Fictions… Perhaps it is only natural that in between the projects where a show successfully implodes the fiction of fake drama, or implodes the audience’s expectations of fiction, or implodes theatre’s fictional frame, or reveals a self-imploded fiction, or implodes the lies of reality and exposes the fiction of truth, now and again a project comes along and simply pops politely, in an imploding fashion, not unlike a balloon bumping unexpectedly into a needle – and folds up. Exactly in the way we imploders expect fictions to behave.

This particular project has – like the aforementioned balloon – popped. Retracted to its own crumpled, wrinkly shape, its true face revealed. It is not a pretty face. It used to be big, red and shiny (if perhaps a little bloated). Now it’s small, raisin-like and a little wet. (Yes, Pip, I’m talking about you again. Oh my god, is that blood? Nurse! Nurse!)

I’m writing from Pip’s bedside at the Norwegian A&E, anticipating a big bill handed over to me with a polite smile by a pretty nurse. (I hate people who smile politely and look distractingly attractive whilst they rip you off.)
- Pip, have you got your E111 with you? Your E111, the European health service… card… thingy… Bugger. Well I’m not paying, you’re the one who fell!?! It’s your fault that it has all stalled, isn’t it? I’m still standing!

But, come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as smug about the whole thing. After all, I was the one who pushed him.

- Øystein

PS. Thanks to all the people who have believed in this project; INSTED, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian Dance and Theatre Centre, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, International Publishers Forum in Lviv, the Norwegian Church in London, the Acting Department of the Film and TV-academy at the Nordic Institute for Stage and Studio in Oslo and of course our eminent producer Michael H. Sciarrone! We will be back with renewed strength before you know it… (After all, we aren’t broken. Only fractured.)

And other important questions raised in Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine

Written by Alexandra Mueller

One of the hardest things is to get people working in theatre excited by a performance. Especially with a text predicted to be “undirectable” like Heiner Muellers Hamletmachine. And especially when two just graduating young directors from London do such a piece.
But in Mondays performance at the Frascati Theatre of Muellers piece directed by Imploding Fictions (Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager) it just happened: nearly one hall of largely young directors, actors, dramaturges, producers etc. got caught by a complex, non-narrating one hour performance. How could that happen?

How could that happen?

Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine is built out of two Mueller pieces: Hamletmachine and Man in the elevator. It starts with the elevator piece: The two actors (Hannah Boyde, Samuel Metcalfe) dressed in formal black suits building their own cage: an easy square of white tape. Captured in it and bound by an extralong tie they start an exhausting auditive journey through the text. It tells the story of a man on his way to his chief. He has given up every individuality to work in a system where only “work is hope”. Really working is the artwork of the two actors, the hypnotizing choreography of their voices turns into the metaphoric machine, the man in the elevator is only one small part. The tie becomes a metaphor: the bounding of the man and the woman is a gallows, a blindfold, it holds and it chains at the same time. This directly leads to the first break in the whole performance: the bounded pair rips their band and is divided into “Hamlet” and “Ophelia”. The cold world of business is loosened, the cage of the elevator is destroyed, the suits were changed into Hamlet’s scrubby look and Ophelia’s white skirt and her old-fashioned underwear.

Mueller’s Hamlet is transmuted into an animal. A mixture of an ape and a parrot, struggling with Muellers text, a lonely explorer in a child’s sandbox. Hamletmachine is only 8 pages long, but it deals with nearly everything: Not only Shakespearean drama but also European history, communism and Mueller’s predicted helplessness of the intellectual individual in the 20th century.

Deconstruction in a sandbox

Imploding Fiction’s Hamlet follows this deconstructing path. He finds some relics in his sandbox. For example an old transistor radio. It talks to him in different voices: those of old Shakespeare interprets whose pathetic voices are quite amusing in contrast to the listening apish boy in the sandbox: “I’m your father’s spirit!”. In contrary to them a comedian jokes about what Hamlet’s family relations can teach us for real life. The Hamlet in the sandbox comes back again to Mueller”s text: asking, screaming, suffering – and also laughing about what pathetic inquiry this Hamlet is longing for. Can any living today just stand stuff like that? The question culminates in an unbearable tinnitus-alike bleep. What also cannot be missing: the skull. There are two covered by sand: a realistic one and one of plastic, blinking blue in Hamlets hand, while Ophelia finishes changing her clothes.

Ophelia is full of little tragic moments, her quiet dark voice fills the whole room, while she plays with nothing but a glass of water. She moves between being a woman, a child and a puppet when she burns a letter with some Shakespearian Hamlet lyrics and when she drips some blood into her glass of water, thinking about herself, “the woman at the gallows”.

And then the turning starts again, the whole performance transforms into a metaplay. The actors step out of their roles drinking some water to refresh themselves, Ex-Hamlet tells with Mueller “I’m not Hamlet.” And just checks if he has any messages. From now on the deconstruction continues until the show ends with two little robots standing in a little elevator made of tape and two actors dusting some glittering snow on them.

Metametametametameta

Muellers Hamletmachine is a secret, it reflects on its own cryptical style, its protagonist talks about being Hamlet and being an actor, he tears up a picture of the author and the author himself seems to talk about all that is going on in his head. This metametameta postmodern style of questioning and being is transferred into a one hour play which is not only analyzing this meta-thinking existence but also funny, emotional and beautiful at the same time. Like the text itself it tries to reveal the layers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of its own existence and of theatre itself.

From one “act” of Imploding Fiction’s Hamletmachine to the next one layer after the other is taken off, like the costumes of the actors. First there is the elevator piece, this well directed artistic voice challenge, then everything is transformed into Hamletmachine’s two broken figures – invented by Heiner Mueller and in their great individual ways interpreted by the actors. Third the former characters become actors/directors by themselves, talking about playing Shakespeare, being authentic etc. Then the media (used in a theatrical way) start to be instruments of exploring how more or less modern techniques conquer the stage: Former Hamlet talking in his mobile phone, former Ophelia listening, former Hamlet going out, coming back without a phone, but his voice still sounds through the phone, which is placed next to a microphone. Former Hamlet having a Dictaphone, recording himself, placing it beside the mobile phone beside the microphone. His voice doubled, tripled and overlayed by another radio and so on.

Some answers to find

If one distillates the essence of the whole performance to answer the question in the title, he’ll come to some points. First: Have the courage to do a difficult, challenging text. Unreadable, undirectable when it comes to questions of narrative, of understandability.
Second: Take two pretty good actors, who seem to like the text, like their “roles”, the play with roles and themselves.
Third: Have again the courage to invent your own magical, ironical, beautiful pictures and to use ambiguous metaphors – while knowing what they mean to you and knowing they are ambiguous. (Although if the furthered theatre around you – as it was discussed in the following talk – is quite narrative and often kind of conservative.)

One can like it or hate this piece – but he or she has to confess, that this Hamletmachine is a work of two directors who really know what their question was to the text, to their actors and to the medium itself. An aesthetic and intellectual statement and at the same time a personal answer to the question: How to do theatre today. And what more can one expect from two young directors at the beginning of their careers?
HAMLETMACHINE
TEXT: Heiner Mueller
DIRECTORS: Philip Thorne, Øystein Ulsberg Brager
ACTORS: Hannah Boyde, Samuel Metcalfe
LIGHTING DESIGN AMSTERDAM: Thomas Wheildon