Theatre Of Cruelty

The Four Stages of Cruelty, Arcola Theatre, London

Simple8 specialise in creating theatrical riches on a shoestring, making you feel that, where drama is concerned, a vow of poverty is not necessarily an exercise in self-abnegation.

I have seen and admired both of their previous productions – a beautifully focused stage version of Les Enfants du Paradis, and The Living Unknown Soldier, an intellectually teasing and emotionally wrenching piece that took its cue from the real-life case of an amnesiac French soldier during the First World War.

Now their latest project, The Four Stages of Cruelty, demonstrates anew the company's ebullient flair for suggesting a whole teeming society with just the use of a few props and musical underscoring by accordion and violin and their knack of alighting on a fertile subject. The title refers to a set of engravings by Hogarth that depict junctures in the downward progression of a protagonist called Tom Nero who starts off as a charity boy torturing domestic pets and winds up, via the debauching and murder of a housemaid, a corpse taken down from the gallows and hacked apart publicly on the dissecting table both in the interests of medical science and as dire warning.

The engravings are pinned up and aggressively ripped down on the washing line that is one of the few elements of decor in a staging that is full of raw, pointed energy and attack. The piece (which was written by its directors Adam Brace and Sebastian Armesto) picks up on little details in the Hogarth and extrapolates them into a narrative that conjures up a society where the disproportionately vicious reprisals of the state against crime were themselves a corruptingly bad example. The play begins and ends with a crowd sadistically agog at a hanging and the public vivisection of Tom. Handsome, big-boned, with bright close-together blue eyes, the excellent Richard Maxted makes you feel that Tom is a reclaimable shifting palimpsest of all his various selves as he finds himself embroiled in working for a protection racket in London markets where the Irish (represented here by the disturbingly mercurial Dudley Hinton and Christopher Doyle) have the monopoly. Individual conscience is not let off the hook, but the piece vividly reanimates the truth of Auden's lines that "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.

The Junction to Nowhere: Scrying Quentin Beck, Part I: Theatre of ...

It started out as a dumb joke where I attributed weird, random occurrences in my nerd friends' lives to THE WORK OF MYSTERIO. Stupid enough (amirite?), but it got me wondering. Okay, so I get how most of the great Spidey villains - the Doc Ocks and Venoms and Lizards, et al. - riff off of various aspects of Spider-Man and the larger things he metonymically represents. Something that's always bugged me is that I could never make that connection between webhead and Mysterio. How does he contextualize our hero? What dynamic are the two caught in, playing off of each other with? There are two things that define our crystal ball-helmeted foe. Obviously one is the whole master of illusions shtick, the smoke and mirrors, hallucinatory gas, hypnotism, psychedelic special effects, etc. etc. That stuff's all very interesting, and it'll be the focus of Part II, but for now I want to focus on a more subtle aspect of Quentin Beck's character that, I think, is essential to understanding what makes him a great Spider-Man foe: the Performer. #13, where he is established as a jack-of-all trades in Hollywood, a true auteur - special effects wiz, stage magician, stuntman, actor, the whole nine yards. His motivation to move to New York City and become a supervillain? Spider-Man's getting all the headlines and stealing his spotlight. It's that simple. That spectacularly vain. Mysterio dons a costume for fame and wealth; he's Spider-Man before he was Spider-Man, when he was going up against Crusher Hogan for $100 and becoming a TV celebrity in But things get even juicier. Mysterio is not just a dark mirror to webhead, but his very existence undermines the moral code Spider-Man has built his life around. When Quentin Beck dons his costume and commits crimes, he does so with a sense of theatricality none of the other Spidey villains possess. For him, it's all a performance; he's all about the spectacle, the thrill, the rush - the fantastical escape from the real world. Like a drug, appropriately enough. Mysterio should be very consciously theatrical and spectacular in his machinations, as if he was constantly wrapped up in the performance of his life. RELEVANT DIGRESSION. When I was in middle school, I had a bit part in a play at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC (yes, the same Folger that makes those Shakespeare books they force you to read in high school. Sorry guys). Being an angsty, histrionic tween, I had a lot of miserable shit going on my life.

Theatre of Cruelty

The theatre of cruelty

The theatre of cruelty, Antonin Artaud: theorist; Jean Genet: dramatist

Theatre Of Cruelty

The theatre of cruelty