It Gets Up My Nose

I thought I'd post the fuller version of this piece written for the Guardian Theatre Blog up here:

There's something in the air at the Royal Court. Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth's brilliantly mischievous requiem for rural England, is a stinker. Literally. As Susannah Clapp observes, "At times, you can almost smell the action onstage."

Stepping in to the auditorium is to escape the exhaust fumes of Sloane Square for something altogether easier on the alveoli. A dewy freshness lingers, tinged with a faint bonfire-like smokiness that tickles at your nostril hairs. When two tattooed heavies wielding branding rods burst into the onstage mobile home, the stench of scorching flesh soon follows. This is later interrupted by the pungency of petroleum, as Mark Rylance liberally douses the same vehicle. It's a smart device from director Ian Rickson, cunningly echoing Butterworth's focus on the inorganic invasion of all that is green and pleasant.

However, each new smell that wafted from the Royal Court stage suceeded in breaking my investment in Butterworth's fiction. In conventional theatre, smell always does.

Investment is a greasy and fragile thing. It is an active process reliant on the filtering of information. Smell always marks and intrusion (or should that be, infusion?) of reality. Where we watch fiction by peering in and sifting out such realities, smell charges at us and refuses to be ignored. By drifting out the onstage world and into the auditorium, it serves to remind us of the space being shared and the realities of performance. (I suspect, given the authentic coppice and live menagerie that clutter Jerusalem's stage, the effect is not entirely unintentional.)

In our everyday lives, we read smell in terms of cause and effect. It points towards that which produces it and, therefore, always acts as a signifier. In theatre, then, where everything else becomes significant - i.e. acquires the status of signification - smell proves the exception precisely by remaining so. As such, when an odour curls up our nostrils in the theatre, we cannot but question its source. The problem being that this draws attention either to the inherent fakery of the smell, or when confirmed as genuine, to the pretence that surrounds it.

In Jerusalem, we know that the aromas produced cannot stem from the sources suggested by the onstage image. After all, health and safety would no more permit Rylance to marinade the stage in petrol than it would allow his body to be genuinely branded off it. We cannot but become aware of the trickery at play. The same is true of the chemical scents that accompany haze and pryotechnics, which highlight their own fakery by seeming too sterile and synthetic. And nothing shatters investment quite like the oddly fishy pong that seems to curdle the air when a fake cigarette is smoked onstage. The sensory information received is too dislocated: our nose is at odds with our eyes.

Even where we can match a smell to its source, as Aleks Sierz recently experienced during the Chinese takeaway scene in Apologia at The Bush, we are reminded that the food being eaten is more real than the characters eating it. Likewise a real cigarette onstage fares little better than its alternative: as wisps of invisible smoke travel through the auditorium, they trigger nicotine cravings in their wake - a real physical effect beyond the bounds of the fictional world.

Of course, site-specific and immersive theatre circumnavigate such problems. Our senses are engaged in 360 degrees, interpreting an environment just as in everyday life. Precisely by playing with the realities of performance - albeit constructed realities - such work becomes immune to them in a manner that traditionally handled dramatic fiction simply cannot. Within the limitations of conventional, audiences will always sniff out the truth.

Review: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Hampstead Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Having received its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre almost twenty-five years ago, Frank McGuiness’s text retains much of interest. While its glimpses of generic trench-life in World War One fall into familiar motifs – hellish conditions, shellshock, lack of supplies – it garners force through its presentation of a political state less proverbial; namely, the Irish civil war that sat against the backdrop of German-Allied hostility.

Thus, the troops we witness variously at conscription, on leave and in the build up to their personal big push in the Somme offensive that will kill seven of the eight, are always fighting a war on two fronts. On top of the jaded green of the British uniform, each wears the orange sash of Ulster, identifying themselves as a faction of the whole. In their final moments before embarking into no man’s land, it is to Ulster that they pledge their allegiance.

In the midst of this is, McGuiness takes a more personal approach by showing individual relationships blossoming within the unit. There is the underlying attraction of Richard Dormer’s Pyper and Eugene O’Hare’s Craig; the whirling, brutish machismo of Anderson and McIlwaine and two different existential crises – one secular, one religious. However, John Dove’s direction stumbles into the clunkiness of these individual scenes, particularly in the second act, which lacks momentum.

As such, there is a great deal of frozen posturing, which allows an easy sentimentality to creep into Dove’s production. Against Michael Taylor’s ever-changing sky, it is too reliant on the inherent nobility and tragic waste of the man in uniform. Rather than truly making us bleed for the characters presented, it tugs at our sadness of the abstract idea. These soldiers are too often manikins stilly representing a generation.

As the younger Pyper, Dormer does well to prove an irritant akin to the lice-infested conditions, but errs towards flamboyance where fayeness would have done. The result is a picture of homosexuality too modern and too obvious from the off. Nor does he find much connection with his gruff, husky older self, played with a Beckettian absurdity by James Hayes. By contrast, Eugene O’Hare finds a touching side to Craig by playing precisely on his own internal conflict with social norms of the time.

But it is the influx of oppositional force from John Hollingworth and Mark Holgate as Anderson and McIlwaine that makes the play – suddenly the unit is permanent watchful, permanently wary, both from within and without, as they prowl around in its midst. A war on two fronts, indeed.