16 October 2009

Suspended in darkness: The Author / Tim Crouch

The attempt is towards a constellation where every idea is a path to and from all others: where the statements made by Crouch’s play move as dynamic moments.

It is unfashionable to talk about suspension of disbelief: most discerning contemporary audience members, as well as practitioners and writers, cloak it in irony. Tim Crouch’s The Author, upstairs in the Jerwood Studio at the Royal Court, named itself a story of ‘hope’ and ‘exploitation’, exploring modern actors’ over-eagerness to please. Yet it revealed that the powers engendering such self-abasement rest in darkness: the blackened auditorium, the back corners of the mind, a quiet flotation tank outside the city.

The crowd sat bisected, facing itself on two raked sets of seats with a tiny platform between; all were prodded and engaged by four actors sat amongst them – Crouch included, playing a capitalised version of himself. It reflected a state which has been crystallised in modern theatre audiences: no longer suspension of disbelief, simply suspension. A lulled complicity, silent disconnect.

“Don’t you love this?” pipes up the over-eager Theatre Goer, gesturing to the lights, the crowd, the promenade, “aaaalll this?” One by one, the audience meet the Theatre Goer, the Author, the Actor, the Actress; the characters began to weave a story, detailing the process of one of “Tim Crouch”’s plays, a violent exploration of an abusive and incestuous relationship in a war-torn Balkan country.

We got all the trappings we were told to expect: some musical interludes; a display of lights, the unravelling of a crisis. The key: this illusion of intervention, as performers and audience acted under what they assumed were each other’s instruction, pretending to mix, but in reality divided.

Crouch’s project seemed an angry attempt to transgress the two suspended spheres, between viewers and viewed. The piece wanted to be an invitation to fill in the gaps created by the curtain-up switch-off that occurs as audience cross the threshold of the theatre; but equally as actors ‘find their process’ to perform. It achieved an ellipsis, a deformed version of the circle of trust.

So; the audience regards itself, waiting, examining: looking for an author-ity figure to get us going. We are half-aligned to with the writer-character, the inflated ‘Author’, as a collective body designed to ask for more and more: like the exaggerated scribe, the audience becomes implicated in a series of actions where the violence, the sexual abuse off-stage as well as on, is the result of our demands on those we ask to perform for us. “Is this ok?” “Are you alright?” “Shall I go on?” We usually concur.

But - actors are not the only individuals who perform. The suspension, that crucial gap between the audiences is nothing but a reflection of the critical crack between manufacture and consumption the factory and the foodhall.

Through the skewed author-audience alliance, we notice that the processes of obtaining information, of dissecting and discerning the behaviour of others, are variations on the same axis: the audience demand from the performance; the writer-director demands from the actors in rehearsal; the actors demand from “real life” in order to feed the chain of production.

When Crouch’s author-figure begins to re-enact a hot-seating rehearsal with his female lead, who has been on a earnest researching field trip and has interviewed a fourteen year old girl sexually abused by her father (“just like my character!”), he invites us to join in the questioning.

Nobody joins; but nobody stops him either. The silence licenses his probing. Karen, through Actress, through the actor, is allowed to emerge through the parameters set in place by the demands of the Author and the space of the studio. Crouch assumes that the audience wants to know, desires this ‘slice of life’: yet he also constructs the piece to make us want to know. We know that the ‘Actress’ is not the actor; we know that the ‘Actress’ is not Karen, the teenager: yet are we not still using each and every one of these figures, real and imaginary? Do we need the actors to comfort us as much as they need us to comfort them?

The onus is once more on the audience. And the message is: this is what you do to us. However this argument comes full circle: the audience does not stop the actor, but the actor does not stop him or herself. The ‘Author’ does not – dare we assume, cannot? – stop himself casually sexually violating the baby of his lead actress; the lead Actor cannot stop himself from lashing out in violence at the autograph-hunting Theatre Goer on the final night of performance.

Where are the provisions for containing, understanding, expressing such violence and violations? What are the conventions which should be used – or abused – in order to do this? How can we bare to watch ourselves?

At times I am unsure whether the piece asks these questions through its own development: arguably not; The Author does not think with its audience, rather it presents a statement of fact, an angry accusation which is realised slowly across the 75 minutes, as we listen to Crouch’s final speech in the dark.

That idea, ellipsis, again. The kind of ellipsis that speaks also to the shape of other Royal Court favourites, notably Sarah Kane, who do not fracture the tradition of British theatre, but briefly pull it out-of-joint. That is, I cannot think of any work of the Royal Court darlings or any others, however violent in its grammar, which demands the audience play a new role. Instead, each play interrogates, and questions, the convention which seems to allow audiences to arrive with their silent part down pat.

In The Author, at the moment of the hot-seating, when we are asked to question (and in some performances there have been audience questions), there is almost a new axis found, we are almost pulled out of our regular suspension in this dark box, but we are returned, unchanged to the regular orbit, still enveloped in ‘the safest place in the world’.

This hang up on cycles, completion, statements is perhaps more to do with a theoretical hang-up than a reaction to Crouch. Theatre here seems unwilling to hitch its bandwagon to the anti-circular notions of performance enacted through Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Foucault’s reading thereof. But a residual thought - what happened to Karen? Do we even care? The brief intrusion of her, a made-up ‘authentic’ person used to bring the Author’s Play/Crouch’s play “alive”, is symptom of an epidemic. As Mamet says, theatre too is real life, people live in it: yet does this mean that the only way to tell the abuse of others by abusing a few more?

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