chartered territories: The Forest and the Field

It has taken a long time to get anything concrete written about Chris Goode's performance of The Forest and the Field. Its absence from the blog so far derives not from a lack of things to say; rather a struggle over what it might mean to wholeheartedly praise or criticise it.

Originally a lecture given nearly two years ago at the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival in Cambridge, this current - admittedly transitional - incarnation found itself playing out in the rumbling darkness of Camden People's Theatre in mid-November.

The argument webs van Gennep's theories of liminality with collective spatial analogies which posit theatre as potentiate forest, suggest a future as a magical-post-liminal field and - a new addition for this evening's performance - finally proposes an archipelago.


The work is entirely grounded in the personal: in finding conversation between the convictions and experiences true to Goode, and the representative trends of the world about him. Indeed, the earnestness which suffuses his critical and creative writing seems propelled by an anxiety over the ethics of working in this kind of big, traditional proscenium arch theatre. The commercial, bums-on-seats type of theatre which typifies the RSC, NT or West End, is the very space for which Goode is most desperately contesting – these are the arenas, after all, which can claim to have a socially-integrated force and scope on a comparable scale to the theatre traditions which Goode recalls.

But the ethical dilemma is that the wider-audience reaching antics of these big Theatres are underpinned by an adherence to a late free market capitalism which has sustained and - in part - constructed these edifices. It is a dilemma which Goode himself flags up during the lecture with a quotation from Keston Sutherland:

and as we know, since we know enough, and since we eat enough, living under capitalism is not an act anyone can desist from, terminate, or even pause in. Try doing it now.

Try doing it now. Sutherland captures more than the anxiety over the Theatre as business; it taps into an anxiety over being itself in a late capitalist context. There is no escape; there is no fantasy forest: more than that, there is no way of saying so, no way of observing our entrapment circumscribed by capitalist exchange without further participating in it.


Yet I feel that Goode has secret hope harboured against Sutherland’s claims. There is always an air of escapism in his statements of what the theatre could be; yet the fantasy that theatre-as-representation can do things which pure language (or pure lecture) cannot, are still subjunctive rather than perfect.

As I suggested at the post-show talk, the logical end of Goode’s Forest project seems to involve shifting the essay’s ideas out of printed form and into a poetics of theatre where these arguments could be made in the embodied vocabulary of performance: not expressing an idea about theatre but articulating it. I had expected, in Goode’s own terms, a theatre more like theatre, rather than a lecture trying to say something about theatre. It struck me that Goode had not quite engineered that shift of presentation which would allow his ideas to articulate themselves as dramatic joints and counterpoints.

The most solid and exciting indication of where this might reach if translated into the poetics of performance came from the projector. In one of the lapses after Goode's deft deconstruction of 'The Empty Space', the projector lit up. There was no image or quotation to be projected with it.
The simple action of the light, creating a glowing-black square on the back wall, punctured Brook's essay articulately and decisively: the light, the switch on, reveals itself both as content, and reveals even more the wall-as-wall, as undeniable, lived-in space.

In the projector becoming visible through its 'empty' light, this innocuous illumination proved a point of genuine engagement with theatrical space as space, moving the inquiry on the page into a physical dialogue with Camden People's Theatre which achieved more insight than drawing shapes in salt.

The fleeting nature of those moments confirms that this is still a piece of work in transition, with several undecided notions of theatre, and space, at stake. In focusing on Shakespeare as a propagator of 'liminal' theatre in what was also a liminal time for theatre history, we miss out on the subtleties of pre- and post-Shakespearian space. More than that, it collapses certain binaries that are assumed but unacknowledged in the piece: what is the difference between Theatres as buildings, as spaces in themselves, and ‘the theatre’? Do the same spatial analogies hold? Why are the forest, field and archipelago such rural and idyllic fantasies of predominantly urban theatre practice? And what about the tension, alongside this, between indoor and outdoor?

Outside the transitional ontology of Shakespeare’s theatre, there is an absent-ed tradition which – perhaps because we know less about it – enacts an invisible pull on Goode’s radically ‘conservative’ vision.

It is the amphitheatres of Greece, which pose a united affront and an answer to the scope of F&F's argument. They are open-air, on the outskirts of the city, and using the landscape as backdrop: on all of the frontiers between Goode’s binaries of rural/urban, indoor/outdoor, building/area. In this model, the playing space, the wilderness and the city are all visible, and interactive, in the same ritual event. Space becomes function, and function space.

And in the neo-classical nostalgia of Goode’s manifesto, it is clear that he wants to return to ancient Athens, not to Shakespeare’s London. This antic theatre, and its spectators, implicitly present to Goode an economy still far enough from modern free market capitalism, a society where the arts had a designated function and appeal, special to itself and no other art form.


Yet there is a potential exclusion inherent in Goode’s retroactive vision of theatre which ensures the happiness of a society of men at a price.

Where is there a place for women? The proto-liberalism of both ancient Greece and early modern England present theatres where women might mingle in the audience, but not on stage. If we take a historicist slant at these spaces, something yet to be woven into the lecture, we must see first and foremost their own individual boundaries and limitations.

Whilst theatre was perhaps one of the few social occasions of ancient Greece which allowed women a spectatorial, participatory role, this cannot be lifted out of its wider contemporary social context, where women were nevertheless second class citizens and breeders. Shakespeare may have had a female monarch, but even her power was problematised by conceptions of femininity and propriety more actively repressive in the populace.

So before we ask any question about fully integrating theatre into society, we must first ask whether theatre is able to integrate society in its fullness, into its practice. However much I am seduced by the earnestness of Goode's argument, and his dissection of Shakespeare’s spaces, how can I be prepared to follow a theatrical vision in which women seem, by proxy, not to exist?
If Sutherland is right and we cannot escape the pernicious value-making of late capitalism which requires the unfreedom of the many to ensure the freedom of the few, then any theatre with a completely integrated social function is not just impossible, it is criminal.
Theatre must speak to more than the theatre community. Ideas of Otherness, of property and ownership, must be available to explore in their greatest scope; yet how can we achieve this with such a small, homogenous pool of artists? The danger of Goode's desire that theatre become more like itself is that it will indeed count itself a little world, a fragile O which still teeters dangerously close to isolation when it comes to reflecting not just the concerns, but the literal demographics and pragmatics of society.


I believe that Goode sees and acknowledges these tensions, the claustrophobic creative and social conditions of theatre which mutually limit each other. Yet his proposal takes us back to the crisis of unfettered resistance in ‘Try doing it now’. Like the making of a Utopian theatre, making any great statement about what that theatre should be, involves a choice and valuation, a corruption of the whole in order to instate the particular. In making his personal claims, Goode must – and does – sacrifice certain social facts, closing off certain paths in order to open up others.

Such is the tension also between the limitless limits of the forest, the field and even the archipelago. No boundary is un-violent; no space is empty; no border is innocent. I wonder whether Goode, whilst acknowledging all of these facts, is still reluctant to spill any blood. Perhaps such encountered claustrophobia, such narrowness in modern theatre’s reaches is what sees him leap immediately outside the city limits to bright, expansive spaces; ironic when he favours so often very dark, quite enclosed spaces in which to stage his productions.
Yet leaping over such boundaries into the next meadow/mountain range/plateau ignores the fiercest and most crucial battles along the frontiers. And out of respect to himself, and his dream of the theatre, it is partly Goode’s responsibility to tackle them.