Happy Pig's Ear

My parents welcomed in 2009 from a train carriage somewhere between Vauxhall and Clapham Junction. Having attempted to watch the fireworks at Waterloo, they got themselves caught up in the stampede, lost the majority of their party and, at about quarter to midnight, gave up and headed home. Along with three other solitary, self-conscious passengers, they caught the hazy glow of colourful explosions through scratched glass windows as, over the train’s intercom, the driver’s monotone crackle heralded the pips of midnight.

There is something wonderful about the anti-climactic nature of New Year’s Eve. As a celebration it is defined by inevitable failure in the face of unwarranted expectation. It is a night possessed of an arbitrary significance, whereby a single second is plucked from infinity and selected for greatness, marked out as the crossing of a threshold, as if a single click shifts time into an entirely new category. Yet, we insist on building a ritual around it. One that must defy its own triviality and elevate the evening into something altogether extraordinary, remarkable and, indeed, historical. The pressure is for extravaganza and excitement. It must nod to tradition whilst simultaneously separating itself from that tradition through scale and ambition. Each year must be louder, brighter and more drunken than the last.

It is, however, the glorious collapse of the spectacular into the mundane that makes New Year’s Eve special for me. You see it in the girl slumped unconscious on a sofa by half ten and in the gentle post-midnight trudge from Parliament Square to Victoria station. You see it in the fog of firework smoke that creeps over South London and in the discarded, crumpled party hats that litter the pavements. It’s in the desperate scouring for someone unknown to kiss at midnight and in the clogged phone networks, in the lonely man sat watching it all on television and in the faltering cheers that always fall short of the countdown itself. Then, over the next three weeks, you see it all over again as resolutions slowly fade into routines of old or shatter in a moment of frustrated weakness and life resumes as normal.

New Year’s Eve is the prime example of failure by trying too hard and, in this, theatre and performance could learn a few things from it.

Since Certain Fragments became obligatory reading for theatre students, failure has become an increasingly important and popular element of experimental performance. Tim Etchells’ writing, in tandem with the performances of Forced Entertainment, has spawned a performance culture that embraces accident and mishap onstage. Accompanying this came an aesthetic of the makeshift and the homemade, whereby fiction is undermined by its literal falling apart.

Over time, however, the two strands have become somewhat detached and the latter has taken over. An increasing cynicism towards the ‘magic of theatre’ has led to the tendency to destroy any possibility of fiction without creating or, at least, nodding towards it’s existence in the first instance. Clunky puppets are manhandled and movements are clumsily bumbled, ill-fitting objects signify anything and everything, text is written with a messy haphazardness and delivered with a scornful disregard. Brook has been bastardized by a generation of practitioners equally focussed on the reality of theatre, but lacking his imagination. The Empty Space has been left well and truly gutted.

The trouble is that such work aims directly for failure. It is a theatre of sabotage that makes a beeline for the broken, stripping theatre of possibility and standing triumphantly in the ashes. Where the performance mode is knowingly half-arsed and deliberately botched, the only commitment is to a lack of commitment, which, of course, leaves everything ramshackle and a little bit shit. In seeking this failed aesthetic, this type of performance becomes failsafe. Its shortcomings are, in fact, not failures at all, but successes, since in failing it achieves the very thing it aims for.

True failure can be hugely enjoyable to watch. Phelim McDermot, artistic-director of Improbable, once told a workshop attended by Present Attempt: “People love to see people fuck it up.” However, the aesthetic of failure is of little worth without an ambition of which to fall short. Theatre and performance can only fail in the face of the impossible: by asking too much of itself, by trying too hard, by lacking the apparatus and expertise, by having too much at stake. It must aim for the utmost of grandeur and eloquence. It must try to strike the deepest of emotions into the hardest of hearts. It must reach for the stars with a stepladder. Or remerge the continents with sellotape and superglue. It must always make the best of a bad situation with the material available. In spite of itself, the theatre of failure must always be a Finale and a Spectacular.

I want a theatre that parties like its 1999, only to find that the champagne has gone flat and the mini-cheddars have run out.

------------------------------------------

While I’m on the subject of failure and shitness, Andy Field’s review of Lapland UK is well worth a diversion. As is news about Forced Entertainment’s next project, Void Story, being made for this year’s Spill Festival.