As hoped, we start on a positive, girding our skirts revealing inelegant ankles, in inarticulate admiration of Tim Crouch’s The Author.
The move towards writing something in response to the theatre I see was initially motivated by outrage: at Simon Stephens’ latest offering, Punk Rock, and its response, the inexplicably uncritical chorus of praise from the capital’s theatre reviewers. Its other, and more enabling influence has been the inestimable Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire. There still aren’t enough critical responses to theatre in the UK. This is the beginning of a small cyber-redress. Okay:
Tuesday 30th was one of the press nights of The Author, and the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs comprised of two opposing structures of raked seats, and no stage, only a narrow walkway between them. “Don’t you love this?” says a performer in our midst, “It’s such a versatile space!” The glee with which the audience greeted the first ten minutes, thrilled and terrified by the piece’s self-reflexivity, I found tedious at times, but the ease with which this humour was revealed to be invested in the play’s bleak destination, was a masterclass of theatrical implication.
The reviewers, distributed evenly throughout the rows, have never been more visible. The Times reviewer, sitting next to me, harrumphed and cheated, flicking through his copy of the playtext. The presence of Dominic Cooke, in the far corner across from me, was compelling; presiding over a piece which questioned the value of a type of play for which the Royal Court theatre has received much attention. These types of plays, whose graphic representation of disturbing acts has not yet been the subject of serious critical interrogation, have had a lasting influence on Western theatre and its audiences.
The basis of the piece was the account of another, fictional play written by the ‘famous’ author (‘… the darling of the universities…’): Tim Crouch. There is a war, dismemberment and incest. These representations, he tells us, are motivated by the ethical imperative not to ignore those things which disturb us in the world. The account of the effect this fictional play had on those involved points towards a deeply held conviction, following Plato, that theatre’s inclination towards social ills contaminates both its audience and its actors. The piece remains deeply uncertain, troubled even, by this paradox. The theatre-maker does not want to shy away from the problems he or she sees in the world, but is concerned at the effects of doing so in excess. Surely, I thought sagely, the answer is moderation. But, as one performer reminds us, art is all about extremes. The only extremes this piece allows for, however, is either to attempt to take on all of the world’s problems, or to shy away from them; the first wildly unrealistic, the second cowardice. The self-referentiality of the play is its own egress, and its effervescence.
The most extraordinary presence was Jules, Tim Crouch’s wife. She, namechecked often, sat next to her husband, beamed at his compliments whilst all the time forcing the danger of the climax to an extreme. Meanwhile I sat in the darkness, grateful for the brief respite the blackouts bring, listening to Tim Crouch’s final speech, appalled by the lengths to which his argument was extended and, to my shame, exhilarated.
A performer asks us, and the play is clever to pose its most convincing arguments first as questions: “Isn’t this the safest place in the world?” A curious accusation, but undeniable. I thought then about the theatre as a social exchange, a permeable membrane realised in the ebb and flow of its audiences. A theatre which feels too safe is in danger of complacency and inaction, but how extreme does a theatre need to be in order to endanger? The theatre’s danger is rhetorical, and contained, but can only be revealed as such after it has presented new challenges to the relations between society and art, safety and danger. Then I started to wonder how daring an act of programming this actually was; rather than proposing a new kind of theatre, it engages constantly with one familiar to its audience. By the end of the piece, however, daring seemed redundant: but it is necessary, certainly.
In contrast, the populist credentials of Inherit the Wind and A New World assert themselves in opposition to Crouch’s artful, formal, offering. They are theatre neutralized of all rhetorical effect, solemnly reenacting a more conservative past in which a radical idea has been met with ridicule, paying mere lipservice to the importance of freedom of speech, doing little more than pour scorn on those whose beliefs have long been ‘disproved’. The former, staged at a theatre which seems intent on convincing its audiences that nothing has changed since it was the National Theatre.
The conviction with which ideas such as the evolution of species were said to be dangerous was greatly undermined by an unquestioning confidence in the effectiveness of traditional theatre. A New World, set in the generic past of smudge-faced street urchins, rehearses the unfailing radicalism of its subject, Thomas Paine, but its most eloquent gesture is towards the failure of its author to renew his radicalism to respond to the challenges of twenty-first century life. The mantra show don’t tell, a favourite of the drama class, reminds us that in theatre form and content must be commensurate, something it seems only ‘experimental’ theatre-makers are able to realise.
Superlatives aside, theatre that is a safe place is ethically dangerous. Whilst we don’t want our handbags to be stolen it is ethically imperative that, in the theatre, our values most worth defending are subjected to the greatest challenges.
The move towards writing something in response to the theatre I see was initially motivated by outrage: at Simon Stephens’ latest offering, Punk Rock, and its response, the inexplicably uncritical chorus of praise from the capital’s theatre reviewers. Its other, and more enabling influence has been the inestimable Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire. There still aren’t enough critical responses to theatre in the UK. This is the beginning of a small cyber-redress. Okay:
Tuesday 30th was one of the press nights of The Author, and the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs comprised of two opposing structures of raked seats, and no stage, only a narrow walkway between them. “Don’t you love this?” says a performer in our midst, “It’s such a versatile space!” The glee with which the audience greeted the first ten minutes, thrilled and terrified by the piece’s self-reflexivity, I found tedious at times, but the ease with which this humour was revealed to be invested in the play’s bleak destination, was a masterclass of theatrical implication.
The reviewers, distributed evenly throughout the rows, have never been more visible. The Times reviewer, sitting next to me, harrumphed and cheated, flicking through his copy of the playtext. The presence of Dominic Cooke, in the far corner across from me, was compelling; presiding over a piece which questioned the value of a type of play for which the Royal Court theatre has received much attention. These types of plays, whose graphic representation of disturbing acts has not yet been the subject of serious critical interrogation, have had a lasting influence on Western theatre and its audiences.
The basis of the piece was the account of another, fictional play written by the ‘famous’ author (‘… the darling of the universities…’): Tim Crouch. There is a war, dismemberment and incest. These representations, he tells us, are motivated by the ethical imperative not to ignore those things which disturb us in the world. The account of the effect this fictional play had on those involved points towards a deeply held conviction, following Plato, that theatre’s inclination towards social ills contaminates both its audience and its actors. The piece remains deeply uncertain, troubled even, by this paradox. The theatre-maker does not want to shy away from the problems he or she sees in the world, but is concerned at the effects of doing so in excess. Surely, I thought sagely, the answer is moderation. But, as one performer reminds us, art is all about extremes. The only extremes this piece allows for, however, is either to attempt to take on all of the world’s problems, or to shy away from them; the first wildly unrealistic, the second cowardice. The self-referentiality of the play is its own egress, and its effervescence.
The most extraordinary presence was Jules, Tim Crouch’s wife. She, namechecked often, sat next to her husband, beamed at his compliments whilst all the time forcing the danger of the climax to an extreme. Meanwhile I sat in the darkness, grateful for the brief respite the blackouts bring, listening to Tim Crouch’s final speech, appalled by the lengths to which his argument was extended and, to my shame, exhilarated.
A performer asks us, and the play is clever to pose its most convincing arguments first as questions: “Isn’t this the safest place in the world?” A curious accusation, but undeniable. I thought then about the theatre as a social exchange, a permeable membrane realised in the ebb and flow of its audiences. A theatre which feels too safe is in danger of complacency and inaction, but how extreme does a theatre need to be in order to endanger? The theatre’s danger is rhetorical, and contained, but can only be revealed as such after it has presented new challenges to the relations between society and art, safety and danger. Then I started to wonder how daring an act of programming this actually was; rather than proposing a new kind of theatre, it engages constantly with one familiar to its audience. By the end of the piece, however, daring seemed redundant: but it is necessary, certainly.
In contrast, the populist credentials of Inherit the Wind and A New World assert themselves in opposition to Crouch’s artful, formal, offering. They are theatre neutralized of all rhetorical effect, solemnly reenacting a more conservative past in which a radical idea has been met with ridicule, paying mere lipservice to the importance of freedom of speech, doing little more than pour scorn on those whose beliefs have long been ‘disproved’. The former, staged at a theatre which seems intent on convincing its audiences that nothing has changed since it was the National Theatre.
The conviction with which ideas such as the evolution of species were said to be dangerous was greatly undermined by an unquestioning confidence in the effectiveness of traditional theatre. A New World, set in the generic past of smudge-faced street urchins, rehearses the unfailing radicalism of its subject, Thomas Paine, but its most eloquent gesture is towards the failure of its author to renew his radicalism to respond to the challenges of twenty-first century life. The mantra show don’t tell, a favourite of the drama class, reminds us that in theatre form and content must be commensurate, something it seems only ‘experimental’ theatre-makers are able to realise.
Superlatives aside, theatre that is a safe place is ethically dangerous. Whilst we don’t want our handbags to be stolen it is ethically imperative that, in the theatre, our values most worth defending are subjected to the greatest challenges.
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