Who You Aren't

What It Was

Last night, Monday 15th March 2010, Chris Goode's one-off work 'Who You Are' set in Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.

What might be called a 45-minute sound installation around Goode's response to the space and his preparatory thoughts on the audience.

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Where I'm At

Somewhere - - disappointed.

After a lot of walking, talking, thinking, strolling, rehearsing lately, I've been thinking about journeying and audiences. About thinking walking - about thinking as walking, a movement, but also about clearings, about Heidegger and revealing, dwelling, technique as techne, letting appear... Feeling also other journeys through acting work involving Viewpoints, Grotowski plastiques and the notion of self-penetration: acting as a deepening and stripping away - a technique of unravelling, of movement into the self, transforming the space of the body that is already there - the body as another Heideggerian clearing, showing us its boundaries and springing away from them.

Continuing to think about journeying last night, it strikes me that Who You Are did not travel into the deep corners, or rather, rejected a collective, metaphysical expedition through the vastness of Balka's great black hole. Definitely an in-stall-ation not an ex-plor-ation.

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Where It Was

Still walking-thinking a bit about Heidegger and audience journeys and self-penetration - surely the point of the exhibit is that it isn't a black box...it's actually quite light. It does transform and transmogrify its own distances; revealing unexpected qualities.

It's quite soft in places, hard and cold in others. The walls are deliberately different textures from the floor: they are invisible, glimpsed only in absence, whereas the floors give light, glow grey in patches, moulded by the shadows or shapes of others.

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What It Wasn't

Indeed, having a cast of silhouettes sharing the space does not mean that we are 'deprived' of sight, or that our attention to sound is vastly heightened, as the piece ironically notes during one 'scene' in which Goode and the familiarly parodic Tate 'Visitor Experiences' manager discuss why nudity is inappropriate 'in the dark' of How It Is.

Deliberately or no, it was quite difficult to hear anything with the balance of the speakers.

What's more, the sense that really needed to be arrested was touch....sitting against the almost furry soft-brushed suedeness of the back wall of the piece made me increasingly aware of how I would like to be made more aware of my own body and its relation to the constructions around it - other skeletons and bags. Telling us doesn't really do the same job.

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If It Weren't -

Another sense - that the piece did not feel intricately thought through - and at times it seemed to fall prey to a technique which too literally takes techne as letting appear and still prioritises the gaze - using nakedness (physical or emotional) as a shield.

After the dialogue with the 'Visitor Experiences' manager, its clear-cut play with the dark space and the imagination, bodies in the dark and the audience's implantation of sexual imagery amidst suggestive dialogue, Goode moved to a dimly-lit lectern on the edge of the open-end of the box, and began a self-interrupting torrent of personal testimony, biography, snatched memory.

The 'confessional', the foregrounding of the artist's honesty (an ironic thing to need foreground...), outpouring of personal detail, becomes a defensive shield. It protects the piece from examining a difference type of naked vulnerability, which is that of the audience and the relationship between performer and audience. It closes the gap between audience and performer, between audience member and audience member, by pretending there is no gap - no connection, just two sets of people in totally different worlds.

Almost antagonistic. Or rather, passive aggressive.

So such nakedness, the self revelation which could not feel like a revelation, instead presents, at poorly chosen junctures, a retiring back into the self - an almost-sentimental 'show' of passion and significance, whose show nearly succeeds in deflecting attention away from the emptiness behind it.

A closing of the gap between audience and performer - because that gap might be a door.

And the performer decides to shut it.

To not admit.

To think there is no light seeping in under the cracks.

When there is always light and shape in shadows.

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How We Are

It felt, then, that such a performance carried some un-considered assumptions about the audience and the dark.

Firstly, in shrouding the audience in mysterious impersonality, in reading us randomly-generated names of people who might (not) be watching in America, in telling us that we are scary, that he knows nothing about us, Goode missed out on a glimpse, a genuine connection, with the peculiar type of darkness that the audience experiences.

Yes we might all be strangers to you (though several of us are not) - but are we strangers to each other? Don't we often see familiar faces, or go to the theatre with a friend, a lover, a family member, a colleague? Aren't I here with several people I know - some I knew were coming, others who I happily bumped into?

Isn't the point that this darkness, this audience shroud, is not equalising or even totalising. Isn't it sort of suspending? Not like the shut door, not a deadening or rejection, not a push into nothingness: rather it is a shifting encounter within a fixed time and fixed space. We become aware that maybe we can't move - or we shouldn't move - but we want to. We might want some water but we can't really open our bag in the dark - can't make that noise.

Doesn't this suspension of chronological time, ticking life, reveal something to us? Does it not let appear certain relations, feelings, characteristics, boredoms, excitements? Sitting in the suspended dark with a friend can often make you more acutely aware of each other.

Maybe that someone keeps looking at you to check your reaction, or maybe you become nervously aware of your own position; maybe your own relation is suspended, allowed to play out or reveal itself in a new form. Perhaps this is just How I Am but this must then be a part of How We Are...

I couldn't feel much engagement with this real intimacy of the audience; the shape of the dark, the contours, much like the architectural fascination we find in In Praise of Shadows.

More than anything, this felt under-done, made resoundingly timid by the grandness of the space it took place in, a space whose work with experientiality should not be competed with but complemented and confronted, expanded: exposed, perhaps, with a flash of light, made actually, temporarily, vulnerable and naked, intimate and imposing. They very grinning photo Goode describes on his first visit to the box, amidst the snapping teenagers.

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Who It May

It strikes me that maybe sometimes Chris Goode is afraid of the audience...that he turns it into a thing, an 'enigma' and this is somehow scary - and so, to avoid getting entwined in this shadowy presence, it is safer to be almost aggressively, pre-emptively naked himself - to stop anyone else doing so.

But if we start to expect that 'nakedness' (in whatever form) from a piece of theatre, it ceases to be nakedness and starts to become a piece of artistic vocabulary: the dreaded nudity that Goode so deftly deconstructs in The Forest and the Field.

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Who I Are

But what shape has a shadow got? How much of performance is there for the performer - how much is there for the audience? What happens if these figures become embodied in the same person? How can performance be intimate without being private? Or particular without being personal? Should theatre play a therapeutic role?

Is that Who We Are? or Who You Are when I go to the theatre. Someone around me who might make me better.

Who is sick.

Who is curing.

Who You Are made me feel oddly impersonal, indifferent to two things in particular:

1) to the audience; even sitting between two friends I felt only myself without pushing further towards my own experience or into the experiences of my two friends either side of me;

2) to the space. I felt it could have taken place anywhere; what's more, it would have been more effective in a busy train station or underneath a bridge with a handjob, anecdotally.

Did it try to fit neatly into the dark. Did it not fit. Was it not dark?

Are we not in the dark.

Is that it?

trying to be nice - Trilogy at BAC

After a conversation with my flatmates this weekend, I have been thinking a lot about justice and theatre. Justice, that is, as 'rightness'; the particular set of rules which may or may not apply when we consider a piece of theatre and how it makes us feel or act.

We had been talking about how performance studies was becoming increasingly popular as a training tool for medical and legal professionals, with actors used to create 'lifelike' situations of crisis or dispute which the training doctors or lawyers could use to respond to appropriately.

I thought a lot more about how performance encourages or prescribes response; but more than that, about how attitude and theatre might have an interesting relationship; a relationship which can sometimes be coached or trained, just like the actors in medical instruction videos attempt to train doctors to exercise more 'gentle' or human responses to their patients particular illnesses or tragedies.
Is it possible to use something like a theatrical performance to 'coach' people into being nice?

And what is it about this tricky word 'nice' that makes me think of Nic Green's Trilogy?

The piece is a self-proclaimed feminist performance in three parts, a runaway success as at the 2009 Fringe which enjoyed a recent run at the Battersea Arts Centre and will transfer to the Barbican this weekend.

As the name might suggest, the piece works in three parts.

The first, about twenty minutes in length, is exposition with dance-moves. Green and friend and collaborator Laura Bradshaw enact a 'celebration of womanhood' which culminates in about 50 female volunteers naked and dancing on stage. Which is exuberant sheerly because its participants are exuberant.

This is followed by the longest - and most arduous - part of the show, which is inspired and driven by lengthy projections of Town Bloody Hall, the film of a public meeting on Women's Liberation in 1971, chaired by infamous misogynist (and bad sex novelist) Norman Mailer, featuring Germaine Greer and Jill Johnston.

Projections of the the two speeches delivered by Greer and Johnston are accompanied by - and interspersed with - the five strong company (four female, one male, as in Hall), reciting in unison various statements and parts of the discussion. They begin the section by telling - and sometimes showing us - how they were born; they end, naked, in a cluster, upstage; seven members of the audience, clothed, tracing circles with their arms gather downstage and move across the diagonal so that the groups switch places. (Greenm in preparing the audience for this moment, assures that their presence at this point will make sense when it happens...it does not.)

Finally, a shorter section which makes Trilogy an argument or a structured piece of gentle rhetoric rather than a discursive performance. A mini lecture about women's rights abuses, a proposed solution in the form of a 'Womanifesto', and the culmination: all the audience on stage, some of its female members unclothed, singing Jerusalem.

Re-reading what I have just described, I am surprised (as someone who does consider themselves a feminist but also a fairly critical cynic) that I enjoyed myself. Not least because I notice how different my voice, and experience, becomes when I write retrospectively about something I have seen; when I try to place it in an order or category of meaning or ideology. I thoroughly enjoyed being at the BAC on Saturday; it was as if I was filtering out my apprehensions, saving the political commentary for the blogpost, or the aftershow discussion.

And there were numerous points which jumped out mid-piece that threatened the political integrity of the piece by being so singularly idealistic.

In the third part, Green 'accidentally' showed us a slide, mid 'Womanifesto', of a lady getting stoned to death. The woman was buried up to her shoulders, in a white shroud and sobbing, keening to one side. The image was profoundly affecting - I spoke to many people (all women) afterwards who said that from that point on they were in tears.

Yet I found the inclusion of the picture a little cheap; as if this woman was a victim of great physical torture and injustice, that was becoming a representational ('poetic'?) injustice too. Green did not tell us who this woman was, where she was from, what year the photo came from, or exactly what the situation or conditions of stoning-as-punishment are. Such necessary details make an unjust event more telling, more clearly atrocious, but equally, they are fairer to the event itself.

There is something troubling in grabbing a picture off the internet (even if Green herself knows exactly what it means and where it's from), using it to powerfully influence the emotions of the audience (just before you are about to ask them to take off their clothes and sing Jerusalem, a wildly misread, politically manipulated tub-thumping England song) and not giving that audience sufficient information to contextualise and truly empathise with the victim.

And here is the rub. Green's piece was about celebrating difference, she cried, the difference in every female body, in every name and history of woman; yet there was very little consideration of ethnic specificity, or class struggle. Money, race and gender score a very desperate, confusing trio: and perhaps the key to really finding a place for feminism in 2010 is to acknowledge rather than condemn the inextricable bonds between all of these issues.

What is more, there was a sense in which Green seemed to be aiming for a kind of non-theatre. Sometimes we were watching dance; sometimes we were being sung at; sometimes it felt like a motivational exercise video, sometimes like a weird power-church.
The form was flawed, but it had good intentions, which almost seemed to misplace themselves, unsure whether to wholly unite or respectfully differ. I am thinking here about the role of nakedness in the piece.

I recalled Chris Goode's latest incarnation of The Forest and the Field, and its consideration of the distancing artificiality of nudity, which tries to cast the unclothed body in some kind of interpretive or eroticised, art-ified fabric, opposed to the honesty of nakedness. Trilogy's physical nakedness was underpinned by a certain ideological nudity, or prettifying; a particular attitude which wanted to use performance, to stage openness, in order to make people more open. Like those instructional medical videos, it was acting in order to get us to act nice, in our own lives. But was it giving us the naked truth?

Perhaps such honesty is impossible in a medium which relies on poetic license. Yet at times Trilogy felt like it didn't want to be theatre at all, so little did it use the forms and conventions of its space and tradition.

There was an element of the show which, my friend Jess rightly pointed out, felt a little like a sermon. I am thinking specifically of the final part. Whilst its attitude was not sermonising, delivered in that long, considered, too-smiley broad cadence which seems to have infused contemporary theatre which addresses its audience face on (I think again about the different - thought nonetheless considered, weighted speech of Tim Crouch's The Author ), but the effect it achieved, and the effect it aimed for, seemed to be one of making us sweet; coaching us, like doctors in those instructional videos, to be more 'human' (I am keeping 'human' in deliberate speech marks), as if we had none of that humanity already.

Though I was troubled by some aspects of the piece whilst watching them, I nevertheless appreciated, more than anything else, the opportunity to feel genuinely included and appreciated in a theatre. I am sure that the feeling of security which I experienced at one point of the performance was not entirely shared by everyone, but I believe that it was respected by everyone. As I mentioned in the beginning, its lack of obscurity meant that I as an audience member felt myself in an expansive space of personal contemplation (and this may have been as much due to my mood that night as the performance itself).

But something about Trilogy allowed me to dislocate my very analytical, often quite harsh, defenses and enjoy the event in real time, rather than anticipating all the points or criticisms we might throw at it later. I am aware that this generosity I felt from the performers may well be the effect of a theatre which deliberately appeals to women; I went with four female friends, and afterwards we stayed and talked for a few hours about our mothers, children, changes in feminism through our families' recent generations.

Yet however much our female discussion might have been conducted in a post-euphoric glow after having been naked amongst strangers on stage, or given the optimism and singular simplicity of Nic Green and her company's idealised vision for contemporary sexual attitudes, it was important.
The piece barely registered, its aesthetic accessories- and they were accessories: save for a beautiful moment when the five core cast created a kind of step ladder out of their naked bodies, draped one over the back of the other, and brushing the hair of the person behind them, created a kind of wave of spiralled movement up and down the ladder.

It was the moment of having a throng of naked bodies (all female, bar one) on stage which made me think. Nothing more.

Is it simply because I am female, and this is theatre about 'feminism' that I felt engaged? What did the male spectators think? What did the male actor think?

I feel confused about my response to Trilogy because I cannot pinpoint anything in the form of it which was thoughtful or so discursive; yet it did encourage me to think about what it felt like to be a woman, to be a woman in a theatre, to be a woman in 'the' theatre, to be in a theatre full of women and men, to be a naked woman in a theatre full of women and men.

My confusion over its meld of form and content has led me to believe that this wasn't a piece of theatre at all: it was a display of attitude, its own manifesto, an instructional example.

If we conclude that it is no longer a piece of theatre but an attitude, a display, I wondered whether it was possible to be precisely critical about an attitude or emotional offering? Is it ok for me to morally judge the impulse behind an action, or are we confined to making a more secure judgement of the presentation and execution of that action onstage? Is it ok for me to say the piece was... nice?

I thought about several different aspects of the relationship between attitude and theatre, and between justice and attitude and response. This consideration of niceness, of artistry and attitude also made me wonder about the role of the critic. It is inadequate for me as critic to celebrate a piece for having good intentions even if its resulting art is less satisfactory, or purely transitory. Yet it is human nature to work with the best of intentions and perhaps not quite achieve: it would be social and emotional cruelty to condemn failure to follow through, because we fail at it all the time.

It then made me think about the differences between the collective and the individual experience at the theatre. Perhaps it is impossible to create a collective critical response; but it is infinitely plausible to engineer a collective experience. The difficulty is that I find my sensory reception and my critical disagreement occurring together, offsprings of their mutual conflict.

So whilst I enjoyed the warmth and contact, so absent from contemporary theatre and our daily lives, of the final section as we stood shoulder to shoulder and sang Jerusalem, I felt deeply troubled by Jerusalem itself.

Firstly, as a former English student who knows Blake's prophetic books a little, and disagrees entirely with the cortarizing of this piece of verse from the bulk of Milton.

Secondly, as a feminist and political being who is uncomfortable with any song that has been trumpeted by the Conservative Party for campaigning purposes.

Thirdly, as someone who is Welsh, not English, aware that equalising cultural, ethnic, circumstantial differences for political unity can lead to a dangerous kind of ideological imperialism which feminism both fights, and flirts with, everyday.

Perhaps a show like this can only achieve an either/or: either political engagement and scrutiny; or a celebratory inclusivity, an interactive event. Trilogy will surely be criticised (mostly be some men I know, and respect very deeply) for squaring itself solely at women in a mode which is unable to be as egalitarian as the maxims it preaches. A play about women for women. Thus some might see it as an entrenchment of several divisions between the sexes: after all, no men were invited to come up on stage and take off their clothes.

Nevertheless, it made a necessary and eagerly non-discriminatory gesture which tried to incorporate the women of the past within and about the women of now. And for this particular reason, its singular focus on the female body was an attempted compensation for the deletions of history. Showing the female body, calling on the female presence today, in order to remind us of the physical similarities that bind women together. With a generosity directly opposed to the denigrating gaze which separates viewer and viewed, woman from woman, until they become competing objects for attention. To present the body in a way which is not primarily sexual.

In this sense, Trilogy is not a piece of theatre, but an opening of parentheses, a long moment. For creating a moment of community within the theatre, which transcended actors and audience, it should be acknowledged. But it must be questioned for its own politics, its particular form which seemed so eager to share yet did not offer a spoken dialogue or discussion of issues. It relies upon the men and women watching to do all of the critical thinking: to separate themselves from that collective moment in order to contemplate it.

So what legacy are women to take up now?

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.

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.

lean upstream

something to do with november:

http://www.leanupstream.info/

eyes peeled for the forest and the field performance.