SADISTIC JERKS: A HAPPY NEW YEAR MESSAGE

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but this blog has at times felt like pouring a whole carton of grape-juice into a bottomless abyss.

The feedback we've received so far has been almost exclusively related to layout. It seems people think the juxtaposition of purple and black has been challenging and colourful where our prose has not.

So, as a concession to our readers (the unhappy few), to show we can take criticism (and would infact welcome some comments), but most importantly to ease your eyes and soothe those saccadic jerks, our purple prose has a new background.

Thank you for reading

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.

IT'S WHAT YOU DO TO ME: A REVIEW OF COCK

Before I saw Mike Bartlett's Cock (and I'm going to make an attempt to avoid all possible puns) in the last week of its run I’d really wanted to dislike it: because of its name, because of its popularity in the newspaper reviews. Thankfully it wasn’t to be so, and I felt strongly in favour of the piece by the end, I liked it, even.

It seems possible, however, that to enumerate my several reservations, here, might productively contribute to whatever is this repetitive strain.

The piece centred around a man, John (Ben Whishaw), who has committed an infidelity with a woman, 'W' (Katherine Parkinson), and told his male partner, 'M' (Andrew Scott), and has promised both that he will end relations with the other.

It was very funny. As in Simon Stephen’s Sea Wall, Andrew Scott’s performance, and especially his Irish accent, lent a great warmth to the performance, which at times felt slightly too seductive. There’s nothing like comedy for instantly identifying a consensus and a hierarchy of thought, an us and a them, and the orthodoxy here felt chauvinistic. It’s an allegation made against gay men I have heard before - that they don’t need women, so they don’t respect them, and that’s why catwalk models are so skinny & c & c. Some of the humour depended on the reversal of a more ‘typical’ situation in which it is the gay relationship which is the shameful: John is agonised at the thought of his female lover coming to his workplace. This notion is predicated on the idea, and wrong I think, that being gay has been totally normalised.

The play’s love triangle structure immediately recalls Pinter’s Betrayal, and before that, Racine’s Andromache, and it is a really viable attempt to newly write this human situation. The geometry of Bartlett’s play is disrupted by the arrival of a fourth, and largely inconsequential character: shortly before the dinner at which John is going to have to tell his two lovers which he is going to commit to, there is a knock on the door, and his male lover admits he has called his father for ‘backup’. This seems a daring joke, a very modern moment of bathos, unfortunately the flaws in the father character – whether badly written or badly acted or badly directed – was the greatest disappointment of the evening. His main speech, in which he sets out what it is to be gay in our society, is largely a succession of clumsy psychoanalysis and sham genetics.

The plays’ several explicitly political moments troubled me: a character talks about the starving in Africa (as if repeating a generalised concern for an entire continent in any way productively contributes to the debate), another by the father about how he says grace since he saw the thing on the telly about Bangladesh ‘or whatever’. In this way voicing the opinion that we are unrelated to ‘the third-world’ un-relates us. An argument over who should eat a satsuma could think more productively about politics than the occasional reference to wars abroad, or the needy at home. Pretending to care about foreign affairs or domestic civil liberties infringements should not be a necessary part of contemporary theatre-writing.

At another point in the play, 'M' tells John: ‘I would torture for you’, and we return to the debate voiced in my earlier post on Dennis Kelly, that is to say, the glib equivalence asserted between love and human rights abuses. The attempt to exclude forms of fascism from love is more honestly made in the poetry of Keston Sutherland, in light of whose work these plays appear dully complacent, as if it were not possible in the theatre to really want something.

In the context of the totally pathetic thing raging at the moment between Boris Johnson and the Ben Bradshaw, over whose candidate should run Arts Council London, it seems that the politicisation of art within mainstream British politics is inevitably accompanied by a neutralisation.

Cock’s playtext begins: ‘There is no scenery, no props, no furniture, and no mime. Instead the focus is entirely on the drama of the scene.’ This play is making a claim for purifying our focus on what drama is. I liked that the clothes worn in the piece could have been the actors’ own. It has decided drama is not things, but bodies and speech.

In between scenes Ben Whishaw drinks from a water bottle on the desk of the prompter, in full view of the entire audience. This act, however unaudacious it is in light of more experimental performances elsewhere, encourages me.

In spite of this, we are told things like characters are sitting when they are still standing, or take of their jacket when they are wearing no jacket. This constant interplay between what is being acted, what enacted, and what is not being done at all, felt at times tiresome. There is a joke about a fake dog , which is vaguely gestured towards at the side of the stage. But of course it is not there: it is a fake fake dog.

Dramaturgies are often predicated in what is present and visible, what is absent and what we are asked to imagine. John asks his partner, ‘M’, take off your top. Andrew Scott does not move, but John says thank you, and we are asked to imagine ‘M’ has. Had he actually done it his real shivering body - so close - would have made an extraordinary dramatic moment, when ‘M’ asks whether he has made his decision now, and John says: Yes. Yes. I think. Yes. The decision to underplay the extremity of such moments is one thing, but the decision that theatre consists of people just standing and talking, is less defensible. This asking us to imagine where no act of imagination is theatrically necessary, emphasises the extent to which this model of theatre is still undecided, uncommitted.

These moments, however, are justified by a strain of meta-theatricality in the play. One character talks of ‘a personality – a character’. John (or was it Ben Whishaw?) is told, about ten times, to ‘be yourself’. This is beyond a joke. The (relative) lack of conventional boundaries between audience and actor is undermined by this need to claim that we are all essentially actors a lot of the time: performing gender, sexuality etc.

At points I wondered whether the dilemma existed only for that the wrong questions were being asked. John explains his confusion in actorly terms: imitating other peoples’ voices until you can’t remember what your own one is. The conceit at the centre of the play is this: imagine you are an actor who can suddenly no longer work out whether you are playing a role, or being yourself. I’d be more tempted, perhaps predictably, to imagine the dilemma at the heart of this play to be less about sexuality than the theatre.

The model for theatre envisaged at the Royal Court seems to be that a playtext is produced as ‘new writing’, then reproduced as ‘new writing’ theatre. This places the newness of the playwright at its centre, to the exclusion of those other elements central to what theatre is: dramaturg, director, actor, audience. For me this is a fallacy: Derrida said ‘writing is inaugural’, and the idea that writing could be done without the act of imagining the theatre for which finger touches keypad (etc.), seems naïve, even regressive. Far better to write for a new theatre than new writing for an old theatre.

One of the play’s most sustained motifs is the notion of ‘going round in circles’. The movement, of actors within the ply-wood cock-pit theatre constructed ‘Upstairs’, is eloquently choreographed. They encircle one another in small, quiet steps, enter or leave through one of the two exits, or ‘sit out’ one scene on the stairs at the side. But the presence of the father character confuses the subtle balance of earlier movements: the dialogue doesn’t viably extend to a foursome, the square stands uneasily within the circle.

One character exclaims: Are we all waiting for something to happen? It struck me that there were points at which the piece was felt meta-theatrical where it should only have been theatrical. This play privileges the dilemma whilst urging it towards a solution, paradoxically admitting the impossibility of saying anything productive whilst waiting for a conclusion. The wrong questions have been asked, staged with almost maximum effectiveness.

That not knowing is at the heart of this play. The challenges made to the self of the person who finds themselves in love with two people; the challenges a theatre-writer poses to his own theatre practice.

The play’s achievements were most clear at the point ‘W’ made a last attempt to secure John’s commitment, sketching out the possibilities of their future together. She remembers their shared plans to travel to Paris, talks about becoming pregnant, she names their children, and numbers their grandchildren, even though she remains nameless. The absurd sentimentalism of this vision of heterosexual life is, by this point, laughable, and the greatest act of brutality: what the play had done to our vision of the possibility of happiness in a life together.

THEATRE OF OPERATIONS: A BRIEF REPORT FROM THE IRAQ INQUIRY AND THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE

One luxury my involuntary post-university ‘gap year’ has afforded me is time. Living in Central London has meant much entertainment and culture within walkable distance. This paradigm, however, has extended further and further, proportionately with the ever longer and colder jogs with the capital’s unemployed along the southbank. On Thursday I walked from Queen Mary’s in Mile End to the British Library via a circuitous route which allowed for a peek inside the Whitechapel Gallery, the extraordinary St. Alban’s Tower, and Leadenhall Market, feeling like a rather uninspired psychogeographer with no winter coat and the wrong kind of shoes. But I wanted here to detail some observations from two unusual (for me) outings: an afternoon spent at the Iraq Inquiry and a morning at the Royal Courts of Justice.

The inquiry was held at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre opposite Westminster Abbey, in a small peripheral room decorated in the blue ‘Iraq Inquiry’ branding. Apart from the panel, and a small group of associated officials on laptops around a democratically circular table, the audience was populated of Whitehall types and women who I imagine must either have been unemployed or retired: one was knitting and another was wearing a palestinian scarf (away from whom the video camera recording the event edged sheepishly).

I was fortunate enough to catch the entirety of Tim Cross’ testimony to Chilcot’s very merry team of peers and knights. Cross, a major general of the British Army, was discreetly assigned to Jay Garner’s Organisation for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Washington, established before the war on Iraq was declared to be resposible for post-war planning. He later followed Garner to Kuwait, again before Britain’s commitment to the war had been declared, and entered a while after the invasion. ORHA were tasked with establishing essential things such as transport and currency. Incidentally, there was no mention of links between companies and ORHA, though last week’s Private Eye identifies a potential conflict of interest between Jeremy Greenstock’s post as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (2003-4) and his directorship of De La Rue, who successfully pitched for the lucrative contract to print Iraq’s currency the month the invasion began.

Cross, an exceptionally intelligent and articulate individual, took the panel through his experiences in the lead-up to the invasion: his difficulties in communicating with Whitehall his concerns that ‘planning for the aftermath’ was deeply insufficient. In Cross’ account of the half an hour he spent with Tony Blair before leaving for Kuwait, it became clear that whatever Cross said, then as well as now, the pragmatism of his task has rendered his position in the operation depressingly insignificant. Though it was clear to Cross from a very early stage that the invasion would be carried out ‘successfully… at least from a military point of view’, Cross said he was surprised at the lack of coherence in visions for post-war Iraq, his initial response to ORHA was ‘There must be more to it than this.’ When he arrived in Iraq an even greater shock was that the structural insufficiencies were less the result of war than long-term neglect.

The most colourful aspects of the experience for me were the phrases Cross used which most explicitly spoke of army attitudes and Whitehall bureacracy: ‘logistic assets’, ‘he [Garner] wanted to follow the sound of guns’, ‘various internecene rivalries in Washington’, ‘theatre of operations’, ‘the southern option’, ‘Fortress Baghdad’ and the three T’s for reconstruction: ‘time, treasure and talent’.

The different components of the team assembled in Washington to discuss the reconstruction were brought together in what the Americans, according to Cross, called ‘a dog fight’. At one such meeting Cross perceived that one colleague had been doing an unusual amount of research: the colleague was invited to join Garner’s team, but later left, or asked to leave. An inquirer asked why and Cross replied ‘he was challenging the paradigm’. ‘What was the paradigm?’ ‘[The paradigm] was the plan is we do not need a plan.’

This moment of dialogue, amongst others, made me feel that this was a privileged experience of political insight. Of course all the information of the inquiry is being transmitted onto its website, but it felt more important to be there. The gentility of the panel (though politeness to Cross felt justified by his ostensible cooperation) was suspicious and I was reminded that the process of their selection has been the subject of much criticism.

A comparable experience, in aim and effect, is perhaps David Hare’s Stuff Happens, and the numerous other pieces of theatre in Britain devoted explicitly to investigating the War in Iraq. The value of Hare’s piece, as well as the others, is the speed in which theatre has been able to respond to important moments of policy and politics, but one can’t help feeling that informationally theatre has often failed to communicate ideas, by staying too close to the format of The Inquiry, an increasingly popular political phenomenon. Indeed Hare’s The Power of Yes celebrated its author’s own personal inquiry into the recession, whilst doing great damage in suggesting theatre is unable to develop its own forms of inquiry. Hare himself has claimed the speed with which theatre is able to respond to contemporary events as a triumph for theatre. When this comes accompanied by the sacrifice of the integrity of theatre’s ability to communicate thinking, or its unique ability to reformulate the ways in which we receive information, it is of no use whatsoever.

The Times’ quote attached to the publicity of Enron - ‘The political theatre of the 21st century...’ – has had me wondering recently what it might actually look like. In the context of my earlier discussion of Dennis Kelly, and soon to be posted review of Cock, the case of former Guantanamo inmate and terror suspect Binyam Mohamed has interested me recently, and I went along to witness the second day of its appeal session. No need to sketch out the background of the case, the media has been doing a lot of that, and they are playing a significant part in it.

The appeal concerns the right to make public the whole judgement of the Divisional Court which apparently contains a number of paragraphs whose content David Miliband claims is sensitive according to the best interests of national security. The paragraphs are known to contain details, admitted by the Americans, of the torture techniques used to extract a confession from Mohamed he now disowns. Mohamed’s legal team and the legal teams of the UK and US media claim that Miliband wants to reduce embarrassment to the Labour government by preventing the details of our collusion with torture and extraordinary rendition to be known. The legal counsel working on behalf of Miliband claims the CIA and USA Secretary of State have indiated that said release of the information could force the USA to reconsider their intelligence sharing agreement with the UK.

The barrister acting on behalf of the government is Jonathan Sumption, whom it has been said is the most expensive man in the business, brough in by Miliband for the appeal case in particular. The lateness of his introduction may have been the only concession to thrift made. Sumption’s submissions to the court were masterfully clear and deliberate close reading – unsurprising from a man who is currently written a multi-volume history of the Hundred Years War – as he effortlessly disparaging the judgements of the previous hearing. Representing Binyam Mohamed was Dinah Rose, the integrity and intellect of whose rhetoric was extremely impressive. It seemed strange that the inmates of Guantanamo were for so long denied access to a lawyer and here were around twenty of them in one room discussing the release of seven paragraphs of information.

What I saw was the battle of almost no consequence whatsoever, something publicly admitted by all parties. What the paragraphs contain is apparently so similar to information already in the public arena that quoting it would, according to Rose, prejudice the court’s decision. The parties opposing the Foreign Secretary are struggling for an ever-diminishing moral victory, to make public that which has been known for a long time. The Labour government have consistently resisted publication of the information we need to know our involvement in practices which run directly against the values for which the British nation is claimed to represent, through the clever evasions of some highly talented and astronomically well rewarded individuals.

Just as the temporary architecture of Brian Haw’s protest, initiated in 2001 in response to sanctions on Iraq, has been mutated into a paradoxically permanent establishment, it seems impossible, once you start to consider the extent to which we have been ethically compromised by this Labour government, you could ever stop protesting.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLITICAL CHANGE

A couple of nights ago, caught in a heavy downpour of freezing rain, I passed between two structures:

Brian Haw's encampment at Parliament Square (established in 2001), and the Houses of Parliament (established c.1100).

WATCHING DRY PAINT: A REVIEW OF PAINS OF YOUTH AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE

A strange comic duo, Mitchell & Crimp’s Pains of Youth has been playing at the Cotteslowe Theatre for a while now. The reports haven’t been good, one friend left in the interval and said it was ‘very, very boring’, I’ve been avoiding the newspaper reviews, but it sounds as if its reception has at best been mixed.

The play consists of a series of fairly dramatic events which take place in the rooms of two female medical students at a European university at some point, it seemed, during the 1920s. The play as well as its characters appear on the cusp of knowledge of Freud’s discoveries, almost as if the principle of the uncanny were being applied to itself.

The first thought that crossed my mind was, as usual, why have I come to this? And then, what is the point in fourth-wall naturalism? And then, how much more could we achieve if we just stopped doing it for good? Where is Katie Mitchell’s engagement with liveness, in all its artifice, present and visible in Waves and …some trace of her? The considerable achievements, however, of this surprising exercise in a nineteenth century theatrical model, have very gradually revealed themselves to me.

hit me if you won’t forgive me

It has long appeared that Crimp’s project has been a careful dismantling of dramatic theatre. This is often manifested in a strangeness of dialogue, which at once appertains to the theatre of Ibsen or Chekhov and the anti-naturalism of Artaud or Beckett.

hit me then if you’re not a thief

Repetition (and its frequent correlative, boredom) seems very much at the forefront of his practice. During one argument, a character says the same line ‘sit down’ four times. Bruckner’s script has been delivered into lucid and elegant English. Words between lovers are rendered with stark brutality.

I won’t let you go until you’ve hit me

Crimp’s repetitions, however, at points felt excessive, almost too easily written. Whilst his dialogue often appears thrillingly incisive on the page, it does not always translate into utterance entirely at home on stage.

he wouldn’t hit me

Nevertheless, many moments suggest that Crimp has accomplished that much-coveted thing – an achievement exclusive perhaps only to David Mamet, Harold Pinter, debbie tucker green and Caryl Churchill – a personal literary language indigenous to contemporary theatre.

he wouldn’t hit me, kiss me harder

A puritanical aesthetic is not the same thing as austerity, or restraint. Vicki Mortimer's set looked simple but expensive; it might have been co-designed by Bang &/or Olufson. An obsession with immaculateness has long evident on the page, in Crimp’s scripts, and on stage in Mitchell’s production. This lies at odds with Mitchell taste for drastic intervention in classic texts, and for this reasons has often baffled critics and audiences. I found myself thinking back to Jeremy Hardingham’s one man King Lear, and wondering: what’s wrong with making a mess? Then I thought of Patti Smith’s Babelogue: “I would measure the success of a night by the way by the way by the amount of piss and seed I could exude over the columns that nestled the PA…” and realised: theatre doesn’t merely reside in the light and shadow of bodies in space. Blood, ink, sweat, mud, paint, are all crucial ingredients. They must be spilt before they can dry.

And I’d rather watch paint dry than dry paint.

The eloquence in the opening and closing of a door were for me the closest approximation to a poetic act (for want of a better term) in this kind of theatre, and a testament to Mitchell’s dedication to detail. In contrast, the apex of of bad naturalism - pointless scene changes – abounded, to the extent that I began to suspect it was all a big joke about theatrical convention. This was corroborated by the (questionable) humourousness of Mitchell’s approach to scene-changes: the entrance of people in sharp suits and forensic equipment felt ultra-pretentious as one of those post-modern beer adverts. Yes; we know Germans (Austrians, whatever) are rigorous, precise, nihilistic etc.

In spite of this, precision is clearly something at which Mitchell’s team are extraordinarily adept. They are an artistic Vorsprung durch Technik. But there must have been more to it, I found myself wondering: was this a very clever pastiche? The lighting, by Jon Clark, was a masterpiece of heightened naturalism. At points it seemed to be that the production was lit solely by the three lamps visible onstage, but this state would shift subtly towards an unnatural and stylised destination. Another aspect of stagecraft, the props, were reinvisioned as a vocabulary of equal importance to the plot: the carefully articulated object-journeys of bottles, books, money, threatened to displace human narratives at the heart of the play. Only a director as accomplished and celebrated as Mitchell could have coordinated such a careful experiment, drawing together conventional theatre’s component parts into an uneasy unity.

Other good things: there were some lovely bits of yoga. Lydia Wilson’s charisma and Geoffrey Streatfield’s distracted brilliance were exemplary, at the heart of the play’s successes. A moment in which the pretty-but-principled maid is convinced to prostitute herself, was particularly affective, perhaps the high-point, it felt like the reason we were there.

We hope to be impressed (or at least titillated) by the progressiveness of what shocked audiences almost a century ago, but this is hard to compute, for we live in the twenty-first century where we can watch, on 4OD, reality tv-shows like The Doctor Who Hears Voices. When the decadence of Bruckner’s play is no longer shocking, what remains to be seen?

The second half jerks between an annoyingly insouciant social satire, languid weltschmerz, and a series of unconvincing proto-existentialist declarations. The characters display an unsentimetalism about medical practice possibly shocking to earlier audiences, but the play itself seems at times deeply sentimentalised decadence. And in spite of the lip-service paid to the play’s rigorous interrogation of scientific objectivity, I remain uncertain as to whether it scrutinised its characters decadence or merely indulged it. The plot – thankfully – proves to be totally irrelevant. (It has just occurred to me that this perceived occlusion is an embarrassment of content which may be my own. I don’t know; you tell me.) The realisation, for which we wait over two hours, is extraordinarily banal. I forget the exact wording, but it went something like this:

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,
Life goes on, bra
La la how the life goes on

A while ago, attending a deeply uninteresting performance of a play by Chekhov, I listened to Jeremy Hardingham working his way tremulously through a packet of individually-wrapped boiled sweets. It seemed to me the simplest, most intelligent intervention in the ineptly conventional spectacle being staged in front of us. In the same spirit, if I were to offer some advice as to how one might go about enjoying Pains of Youth it would be to listen for those moments of interference,and watch carefully for the flickers of artifice. The characters constantly question whether they should “embrace bourgeois existence”, and this indeed seems relevant to the production itself. Since reading Nicholas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics I have been wondering whether the most interesting endeavour of Crimp’s theatrical practice resides in engagement with and resistance to the role theatre plays in bourgeois subject-formation. This endeavour is at its most successful when resistance is most forcefully attempted, or argued for. The less pleasing – more dissonant or boring – the production was, the more I liked it, the more important an endeavour it seemed. When you don’t care what the characters are saying (“I’m going to commit suicide…”) you are more free to admire the wallpaper, untroubled.

But is this anything more than a jaded theatre, which thinks its own cynicism clever? Crimp’s writing is at its best where it is most ethical, and this is most often at the points in which the pressures of parenthood are central. This piece, so interested in the uncertainties of youth, feels deeply ambivalent. Should it, like Bruckner’s protagonist, do the decent thing and commit suicide? In the context of last week’s revelation – Chris Goode’s The Forest & the Field – it seems that unless a theatrical intelligence is motivated towards the creation of something hopeful, which in turn hopes for something to be created good, this kind of cynicism feels more than just unimaginative – deeply unclever, troublingly unproductive.

This is the bit of the NT programme designed to embody the nation’s most successful experiments, and "pure art" free from bureaucratic concessions to diversity, opportunity, accessibility. But this is avant-gardism revealed to be aesthetic, palatable, and its conclusions foregone. It only remains to ask whether this isn’t the most successful of experiments but the most compromised.

no innocent line// [no innocent party]

Perhaps it is only because I have been reading it very closely this week, but the comments made by Michael Billington last night in conversation with John Stokes seem to work a neat parallel alongside Baz Kershaw's observation of contentions between modernism and post-modernist in The Radical in Performance.

Kershaw argues that 'radical performance' - as moments of theatrical presentation- most effectively emerges in a field where modernist and post-modernist visions of the world collide and interact: where symbols and semiotic systems are interrogated by deconstuctive, self-reflexive, participactory tendencies that destabilise heirarchies (between audience and actor, meaning and sign, tradition and representation).

As far as I can tell, post-modernism is not at work for Michael Billington. Whilst Kershaw neatly points out that post-modernism signals an "as yet fictional historical phase", he rightly notes that post-modern thinking has suffused the world in which we live. Billington, it seems, wants to save, or re-instate a modernist world in which certain theatrical principles, and ways of seeing, can be taken for granted.

'Experiential' theatre which takes place outside designated 'Theatres' is dismissed as leaving no lasting trace, and existing only in the present. Billington - not unjustifiably - fights the cause for the text, the playwright. Yet it feels as if rather than placing these undoubtedly elemental skills and materials as part of an ongoing dialogue in an ever-changing tradition (which acknowledges, as Kershaw does the encountered 'limitations' of theatre vs. the troubling 'limitlessness' of performance), Billington wants to preserve them at the expense of everything else.

Billington tells an anecdote about Augusto Boal attempting to set a play about domestic servitude in Argentina in the houses of the women he is working with; when Boal suggest that they set the play in the houses where the work, the site of their servitude, the women demur: they want their play in a theatre! The point is spot on, and undeniable in its relevance: Billington chuckles. It is a delightful ('seriously funny'?) observation on the potential hypocrisy of 'on the streets' theatre; but he asked the audience to remind him of Boal's name.

There is absolutely nothing reprehensible about Billington's obvious tastes and preferences - who are we to judge or deny Pinter, Shakespeare or Chekhov as great dramatists? - however, there is something suggestively dubious about saving what he calls 'texts' at the expense of all else.

After all, contemporary theatre practitioners' work contributes as much to our understanding of theatre as any new play. Not to mention plenty of companies like Complicité and Cheek by Jowl whose relationship to a host of practitional traditions, international theatres and languages create a newer challenge to conventional ideas of borders, frontiers and definitions.

More than that, it would be a fascinating (and necessary) extension of Billington's State of the Nation if its social/theatrical historical dialogue mapped out a conversation between these bodies that existed in foreign languages, with touring international companies as well as British companies working in other languages, inimical to the flux of exchange and ever-altering equivalencies and identities in a Western free-market capitalist 'performative democracy'.

More Kershaw there. He points out that so much of this tension extant in contemporary exasperations over Theatre/theatre/performance/performativity lies in the imagined binary that is figured like Cressida's split gaze: the post-modernist eye twitches at the (perceived) 'limitations' of "theatre" and with the other modernist eye waters at the potential 'limitlessness' of "performance".

The point is that the above binary, like Cressida's split gaze, is a division where there is actually pollination. Modern theatre/performance's perspective is cross-eyed, not doubly-divergent: these eyes should meet, however squ-iff they might be.

Yet Billington seems to represent the modernist slant on theatre so far as to resist the value of post-modernisms' slippery interjections and discursive attempts to connect to a society where theatre≠ the Theatre, and text is not the only loading bay for meaning, memory and lasting experience.

I ask him, with reference to a quotation from Chris Goode's The Forest and the Field [F&F-related post forthcoming....] about whether he means that theatre can only be 'more like theatre' inside under a proscenium arch with a comfortable middle-class audience. (The Guardian, Billington's paper, recently described Goode as "British Theatre's greatest maverick talent"; yet Billington draws a complete blank when I naively add, "who I'm sure you know" as I describe Goode and his work.)

He doesn't really answer the question. The space/place issue, so central to Goode's earnest engagement with the dichotomies of theatre(//performance - dare I add it) is turned into a binary where the dark spaces of the Jerwood Upstairs are edgy sites for exploring new texts whereas 'trendy' warehouses in East London exist only to displace the middle class audience and hand them a slice of superfluous 'cool', a momentary experience with no residue, no text, nor history.

When he is then pressed on what audiences can and should do to help theatre find itself, he cites Travelex £10 tickets as the greatest change in theatre in the last 10 years whilst still evading all notions of class that do not disappear just because the price goes down. (Though he does add that if theatre was free, class would not be a problem.)

But what are we to do, then? Are all performance experiments outside a theatre bound to die a death the moment the 'experience' finishes? Does that mean we can't do a text-based play in a warehouse? Why are we still assuming that a text has to be a written piece of script? It is as if Billington has pitched his tent on the modernism side of a debate which Kershaw demonstrates is now an illusion: that modernism=theatre and post-modernism=performance.)

All the exciting potentials, freedoms, obstacles presented to contemporary theatre (and I deliberately say theatre here, not performance) seem ready to be abandoned.

?

Discussing his late friend Harold Pinter, Billington noted"that there is no innocent line" in a Pinter play. But let's not stop there, Michael. There is no innocent line full stop. There are no innocent parties, political or otherwise; there is no innocence in a world, or theatre.

Where Billington stands, and what kind of theatre he likes, was made perfectly clear via his un self-conscious dismissals and appraisals. I have no designs on 'tastemaking' - I am not on some Arnoldian project - but why raise up and list anybody's tastes if not to dissect and truly discuss them?

Stokes never interrogated anything, he simply added a few more names to the set menu. It's shame he was not taking questions too: there is a lifetime of discussion to be siphoned from his throwaway analogy between Pinter and (our peripatetic Arnoldian) T.S. Eliot, in which Billington's assertion of the impossibility of the existence of modern British 'theatre' (I have no idea what that word means these days) without Pinter is vacuum-packed with Stokes' statement:

"modern poetry would not have existed without T.S. Eliot"

Yes it would. It would be a different prospect, yes, but it is dangerous to play the father-son artistic reproductive game in a cultural epoch that demonstrates the usurpation of physiological filiative principles by dissolution, the fracture and dissolution of fixed systematic principles; the negotiation of allegory and symbolism itself, surely?

It is a shame that the we as audience could not temper our own politeness with a little more incision.