Review: Live Long and Prosper, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Knees buckling beneath him, Spock crumples towards death. His hand slides down the glass panel in front of him. Looking into the eyes of his friend and captain, James Kirk, he offers justification for his self-sacrifice: “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.” With a defiant final gesture, an iconic palm with fingers split, he dies. Just outside a pound shop in Berlin.

Meanwhile, across town Frankie Dunn/Clint Eastwood removes the artificial windpipe of his million dollar baby, Maggie Fitzgerald/Hilary Swank in a laundrette and in the same city, next to an ice rink, illuminated by the soft glowing colours of a nearby funfair, Sergeant Keck/Woody Harrelson clutches his stomach and screams in agony, his platoon tending to him as he slips away.

Gob Squad’s twenty-minute film remakes seven such cinematic death sequences in and around Berlin’s public spaces. Playing on two screens, allowing comparison between the original and its everyday echo, it captures the sentiment and simultaneously sends it up: emotion marinated in ridicule.

However, it is the intellectual side of Live Long and Prosper that really thrives. Underneath the humour, there is serious investigation. The film almost turns against its own medium and outs its corruption of reality. The familiarity of these cinematic images – perfect tears rolling down perfect checks, empty eyes towards camera, red circles on white shirts – is here exposed as damning of itself. Life – death – doesn’t work like that. It is not neat; it is not eloquent; it is not tragedy-by-numbers. Yet these deaths, exquisitely framed and formed, feel real because they have come to supplant reality. After all, for most of us, death is only ever directly encountered on screens.

Hence, the very public nature of the space’s Gob Squad chose to invade. Their forcible intrusions of death, albeit fake, into the public sphere makes conspicuous that which is customarily tucked away. And yet, the city whirs on. In the background, suited legs and high heels catch the camera’s attention; shoppers browse shelves, tourists gaze out of windows, escalators climb on. The world is oblivious and, in its oblivion, the world becomes inhumane.

This makes for stark contrast with the figures within the scenes played, where, for the most part, the focus is on the process of dying as much as the moment of death. The majority of the selected scenes involve a degree of self-consciousness. Whether it is in the grandiose monologues to those gather, tearful farewells to a loved one or simply in the eyes of a paralysed, mute fallen champion, there is an awareness of death’s encroachment. Death is the antithesis of the life that surrounds these scenes. It is a certainty always unprepared for, and these final moments of acceptance (or non-acceptance) are a mark of the impassable threshold.

Life always goes on. Where the originals cut off, Gob Squad linger on breathing corpses and those left grieving. This they suggest is the burden of the living – the really living. Films need not mourn. Perhaps they leave tears to be wiped away, but they need not mourn. Death alters life and it does so inexorably. In those contorted faces, those cradling arms, there is a thin thread towards those that pass by the recreations, caught momentarily on camera and it is in death’s permanent effects, its echoes and remnants that drag unseen behind us. For the passer-by, for all of us, oblivion is necessary. Without it, the burden of the living would be too great to bear.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

As settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations zaps through a number of parallel universes to tell the story of Roland and Marianne’s relationships.

Marianne’s a quantum physicist. Roland’s a beekeeper. They meet at a rain-soaked barbecue. Sometimes they date. Sometimes they don’t. They break up. Sometimes they get back together. Sometimes they don’t.

Review: A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars


From my pulpit, I am engaged in a slur campaign. For no reason other than his political allegiances, I have written several libellous letters concerning the Mayor to my fellow townsfolk. All are, of course, left unsigned. After all, as the town’s priest, I cannot have suspicion turning my way. The following day, when the town council meet to banish one of this community, two names emerge – mine and his – before a surprising turnaround sees him escorted into the wilderness.

Do I feel guilty? Not a jot. Without the Mayor, my own political party of choice – the rigidly traditional Wrens – walk an easy path to victory and take control of the town. Personally, my own standing in the town increases, leaving me free to turn my slander on a new target: the quiet woodsman. Why? Because I can.

This is A Small Town Anywhere and, in it, suspicion and manipulation, paranoia and self-preservation are our rulers. Part balloon-debate, part role-playing game, part unscripted play, A Small Town Anywhere hands over the reins to its audience of participants, each of whom is given a role within the community, and allows history to be shaped by our decisions and snap judgements. Over two hours, a week passes and a dramatic one, at that, filled with elections, allegiances, coups, blossoming relationships and betrayals.

Ostensibly, we are trying to identify and cast out a figure known as The Raven, who knows a bit too much about each of us. I, for example, cannot have details of my affair with La Chantreuse emerge. Others have their own secrets to hide. However, in the course of proceedings, our individual objectives take over. In other words, as in life, there really is no ultimate, collective end. Instead, we find our own targets and employ tactics towards that end.

That this scope for free choice exists without scuppering the event towards chaos is a credit to how well-designed A Small Town Anywhere is as a game. We are observed and monitored through spyholes in the walls, through this never becomes intrusive, and both the disembodied, calming voice of the Town Cryer and the letters received each day serve to keep the game rumbling on apace. In short, the game can adjust to every possibility, including, on this occasion, a well-intentioned mutiny and a final refusal to sacrifice any member of the town.

The pacing is perfect, such that we are gradually immersed in a fiction to the point of investment. The functional rules are explained succinctly and delicately, though there is neither the possibility for nor the pressure of going wrong. Through email encounters with Henri, the small town historian, you gradually invent your character and a backstory of sorts. Yet, this is no Murder Mystery party; there is no sense of acting. You, yourself, are very much present in the small town. Your decisions remain yours, not those that your character might make. Not only does this remove awkward inhibitions, it allows the piece an ethical and political dimension beyond the bounds of the small town. You feel the weight of betrayals as much as the excitement of transgressions.

There are a few nagging concerns. The role of The Raven feels underdeveloped and, at times, a certain arbitrariness creeps in, such that targets are chosen simply to chose a target, but this, of course, brings its own implications. Equally, there is a sense that suspicion is often born of no more than prominence. It was interesting to note that those participants that stuck to running personal businesses were less likely to attract mistrust than those given public duties, such as the Mayor or the Publican. Perhaps, also, there is a feeling that the creators learn more than the players by seeing the range of possibilities and charting a wider history of the many different small towns that spring into existence.

Though I suspect that it may happen in due course, A Small Town Anywhere would benefit from sharing the outside perspective. At present, I know that, as the Priest, I acted less than impeccably with a certain relish. However, there is only a soft sense of specific wrongdoings and the effects of actions. Without some record or judgement post-event, one doesn’t become fully accountable for misdeeds committed. Indeed, it becomes far easier to dismiss A Small Town Anywhere as mere play, despite the strong moral, political and social elements that undoubtedly exist therein. All they need is backing up.

But what if it is just play? Would that be so bad? After all, it is in the bar afterwards – swapping stories, exchanging experiences and dissecting the event – that a real community comes into existence. As strangers connect afterwards, A Small Town Anyway grows in import and the game really does begin to matter.

Review: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Vaudeville Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Aside from the poetic magnetism of its central figure, Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play has little going for it. The entire narrative pivots on a cabaret act of seven or so minutes when the coy little Lancastrian girl reveals the incredible scope of her sound-shifting, chameleonic larynx. All we want to see is Little Voice’s star turn, rattling through the familiar voices of Shirley, Cilla, Edith and Judy. The rest feels like a dragging inconvenience.

Thankfully, Diana Vickers (her off tele) pulls the routine off with aplomb. Though her vocal simulacrums are never quite perfect enough to dumbfound, she consistently catches sufficient likeness to stand in for the greats. Equally, you only get half a sense of vocal chords possessed. The alien voices never quite burst forth intuitively and uncontrollably, but seem instead the result of quite conscious manipulation. The training process of rehearsals is always just about visible and slightly takes the edge of her rawness.

Let’s not get too excited about Vickers, though. Two other monologues – one sung, one ranted – she has to do little more than seek comfort in a baggy brown hoodie, stare at a record-player and be a bit sheepish.

Her casting, however, makes for a curious case. As a role, Little Voice demands a phenomenal vocal performance. Anything less and the entire play collapses, while to just about get away with it is to astound. In effect, we are applauding the talents of the actress for the routine performed and witnessed. It is the feat of cycling through incarnate incantations that impresses. However, the fiction leaves us predisposed to be impressed. We are inclined to applaud because actress and character are spun together. We see before us the reluctant performer that is Little Voice, we know of her father’s death and of her mother’s alcoholic awfulness. The narrative’s purpose is solely to sentimentalize the act and so prejudice us towards applause. In fact, Cartwright’s play is the fictional equivalent of the sob stories that clutter television talent shows.

The confusion, then, comes from Vickers’ own history. As an X Factor graduate herself, we cannot but associate her with Little Voice, as a young girl used to singing into hairbrushes, plucked from everyday life and bunged on a stage. We marvel at the actress, Little Voice and Diana Vickers all at once. The conflated whole strengthened by the mutual support of its constituent parts.

And yet, Vickers’ presence undermines the piece as a whole, given that she is a product of the very industry that Cartwright sets out to attack. Suddenly Ray Say (smartly played as slick as fudge by Marc Warren), the greasy small-town talent agent who ‘spots’ Little Voice on a late night visit to her mother, seems doubly vindicated; astutely ahead of his time, even. To be honest, this seems somehow symptomatic of the production’s true intentions whereby commerce is elevated over statement.

Perhaps, though, that’s fine. After all, Cartwright’s play is something of a fairy tale and, by ignoring the wider socio-political conditions of the time, director Terry Johnson has very deliberately placed the narrative in a bubble. Lesley Sharp meanwhile does her level best to make a pantomime of it all, over-dominating proceedings as LV’s monstrous mother, albeit, admittedly, without ever resorting to stereotype, and there’s strong comic support from James Cartwright and Rachel Lumberg.

Review: Room Temperature Romance, Barbican Pit Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Examining those momentary nothings that, taken together, make up a lifelong friendship, Levantes Dance Theatre misjudge the balance of design and substance and so succumb to a trite tweeness. All girlish giggles and glances, Room Temperature Romance is the dance equivalent of knotted pinkies that promise to be friends forever. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Often it calls to mind a French and Saunders flashback sequence: the sort in which the pair run through fields or bake cakes, only for one to fall foul of a clumsy disposition and fall down a well or become clouded in flour. Then, of course, they turn to one another and laugh, still ‘bezzie mates’ in spite of mismatched natures.

Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison make a clownish double act. Sharing stark Frida Karlo monobrows drawn on in marker pen, they create flashes of touching comedy but lack a strictly defined hierarchy that would allow their routines to gain momentum. The contrast of Harrison’s flickering eyes and Edipidi’s doltish, empty gaze simply isn’t enough. In fact, the whole piece has a soft focus fuzziness that prevents it from really achieving anything more than a pink and fluffy feel.

As dancers, they veer towards the distinctly unvirtuosic. The tatty synchronicity and dumpy clunkiness adds a certain everyday charm, matched by the doddering uncertainty of their older counterparts, who interrupt proceedings to stage manage with an air of fond nostalgia for mischief past. Too often, however, their choreography relies on monotonous call and response. It follows a pattern of withering domination and wilting submission, where Edipidi’s doe-eyed mimicry of Harrison inevitably relies on offering something a bit less good.

This monotony is, however, concealed – at least, on the surface – by the boldness of Room Temperature Romance’s design. The vibrancy of its colours and the cut of its clothes give it a sumptuous visual element. The emphasis on fashion, however, detracts from the bodies themselves, which seem mere motors for swishing hems. The result is to sap the instinctive oomph of movement, to stop us swaying subconsciously along in our seats.

Add to this too much stage business, noticeably overplayed clowning and hackneyed discussions of SMS etiquette and Room Temperature Romance drags.

In its final moments, as the stage fills with miniature mechanical pigs and the pair down Guiness in frosty pink gowns against a deep turquoise background, the piece reveals what might have been. It is a sequence at once surreal, real and fictional, sparking images and ideas of recognisable friendships while also turning an eye on itself.

Instead, Room Temperature Romance takes a widescreen view and fails to find the details that can turn its nothings into something special.

Review: Raoul, The Barbican

Written for Culture Wars

Raoul is not a one man show. If it seems that way it is because its cast of hundreds happen to share a single body. James Thiérée is legion. There are times when each of his limbs seem controlled by a different consciousness: his arm slapping his astonished face whilst the other tears at it like a protective bystander. Elsewhere he genuinely seems to multiply – as if by mitosis – and shapeshift; his body morphs into all manner of animals, objects and even elemental states. To watch him is to be astounded by a fluid being unbounded by its own human limitations.

And yet, as a show, Raoul gains its weight precisely from its humanity. It wrangles with an overwhelming existential crisis, full of fear, loathing and furious exasperation. To belittle is as spectacle alone is to ignore the fact that it is a circus of the self.

On entering we are faced with a jaunty cubist landscape of white sheets that seems a shipwreck of twisted sails or a theatre torn down, its curtain railings come unhinged. Beneath them is a shack of scaffolding poles, itself filled with musky knick-knacks. This is the isolated Raoul’s castle. It protects him from both the world and another figure: a hostile self that lays it siege, charging at the walls and forever gaining entry. The two Raouls are inextricable. No matter how the first tries to escape – hiding in oil drums, cocooning himself in bed, pondering himself in the mirror – the other always catches him unguarded. Raoul’s is an existence stalked by his own self, confronted by an ugly, unwanted doppelganger at every turn as he attempts to fend of crisis with self-definition.

There is a certain tragedy about this first Raoul. He is a man always at odds with himself; a hapless figure forever tying himself in knots. He tries to cross his legs only for them to slip off one another. He tries to play music, but gets only the grainy crackle of scratched vinyl or the final combative blasts of an elusive symphony. His reflexes are unexpectedly reversed and his even his clothes prove evasive. Thiérée’s dazzling skill as physical comedian, his deftness with repetition, never absolves this tragedy. We laugh just as much as we associate with this man, caught as he is in a cycle of unattainable objectives. Ever tried and all that.

Alongside this is Raoul’s crippling self-consciousness, not only in the form of his stalking self, but also in our presence. At several points the house lights bath us in light and he stands at the edge of the stage on show, vulnerable, judged and paralysed.

Yet, Raoul must duel not only with himself, but also his environment. As his house diminishes and decays, the world becomes ever more watery. Oversized creatures, airy elephants and metallic fish – junkyard creations, all very much manmade – approach, sometimes inquisitively, sometimes threatening. His clowning follows a steady pattern. He discovers, shares with us, loses control and moves on, such that the universe seems wondrous but beyond dominion.

I suppose the show hinges on the credit it is given by its audience, whether will look beyond a clown and see a philosopher. For me, the leap was unavoidable, but I can understand how others will see only a man engaged in human origami. Perhaps this is true of all circus or visual theatre. Either way, there can be no doubting the skill of Thiérée’s performance. What does undermine it slightly is the ‘how did they do that factor’ – our need to understand the mechanics of an illusion, such that when the timing is the slightest fraction out, we spot the trapdoors that makes his duplication possible.

But then there is also an honesty to Raoul. At its end, with the white box become black void, he takes flight unexpectedly. Perched at the stage’s edge, he rises slowly, inexplicably, faster and faster, spinning up a cyclone onstage. Then the lighting shifts from illusion to revelation. Our eyes become accustomed to the dark and we make out two stage hands frantically operating a crane. Order is restored. It is as if Thiérée throws us a wink. We know that our eyes have often been tricked, but here is his confession. Even as he flies above our heads, Thiérée admits that the theatre cannot make a man fly, but also – wonderfully – it can.

The stage makes possible and Raoul revels in its own fluid liminality. It is filled with mirth and melancholy, humanity and beauty, small triumphs and inevitable failure. Afterwards, coursing the city and boarding the tube, Raoul’s world of fluctuation lingers. It may take a while to readjust to the tedious solidity of ours.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

As settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations achieves a concise and clear-headed illustration of the implications of parallel universe theory on our understanding of free will.

The multiverse is made up of an infinite number of parallel universes, all of which, when taken together, encompass every possible sequence of events. At every junction that has several possible outcomes, each will occur in a separate parallel universe.

At first glance, it may look as though our actions in any single universe are determined. They must follow a set path in order that every possible outcome can occur. However, it’s possible to reconcile free will by saying that, in the individual moment, we make a free choice, but it also happens that elsewhere, other versions will freely choose otherwise, so that every possibility is exhausted.

Review: The Factory's Hamlet, Arch 635

Written for Culture Wars

Even for the most well-drilled company, Hamlet is no mean feat. Exalted to the point of petrifying, bursting at the seams with iconic lines, lofty philosophy and high emotions, it is a three hour wrestle with the human condition. Imagine, then, being cast as the despairing Dane a mere five minutes before your first entrance, armed with only the text as learnt by rote, in a production that no more knows its course than you do. As if that weren’t enough, someone’s just handed you a giant polystyrene skull as your first prop.

The Factory’s Hamlet, clearly, is a gargantuan task. For the past two years an eclectic collective of actors have been conjuring Hamlet anew in different locations. Sometimes they play on a stage, using whatever set happens to be there. Sometimes in a found space. Tonight, we are in a converted railway arch in Clapham with a bar modishly dressed in black and neon. Passing trains rumble overhead piercing the play with ominous bursts of thunder.

It works thus: having each learnt several parts, actors are pitted against one another in bouts of rock, paper, scissors to determine the casting. Audience members provide the props and move between acts to reconfigure the playing space. After a ten-second countdown, it begins.

So it is that the ghost bursts in with a head of molten armour fashioned from tin-foil, that Prince Fortinbras is crowned with a novelty hippo shower-cap and that Hamlet and Laertes engage in a duel of pulling power, having plucked out two audience members for a tragical snog-off. This is no “sterile promontory,” but a world of waxy surrealism: wayward and stalked by madness.

There are, unsurprisingly, both gains and losses in this mode of presentation.

As an audience, our attention is split. Events multiply. We see both the world of the play and the actual space in which it appears; both characters and actors. We immerse ourselves in the story and simultaneously admire the telling of it at one remove. It is as if a version plays out in our heads to which we become emotionally connected even as we disconnect from the one in front of us, amused by the jarring discrepancies of image and text as, say, Hamlet brandishes a dainty fan in threat or Barnardo cowers beneath a cycle helmet.

But, isn’t this what happens in any theatre? Do we not watch the action behind our eyes whilst that before us fails? This honesty marks The Factory’s house-style. Aware of its own ridiculousness, it seems to observe itself scornfully even as it invests with wholehearted earnestness.

With such emphasis on the imagined narrative, the play becomes clearer than ever before – with the exception, tonight, of a frayed third act, which buckles in the tricksy playing space of the bar and the decision to have two actors share the titular role. With images offering little assistance or correspondence, one’s ear tunes in to the text with unusual diligence, pricking at its nuances and repetitions. An unexpected purity, even faithfulness, emerges whereby we receive the text almost as if reading it at our own pace.

Alongside this, the display of choice somehow distils the play. Given the obviousness of what might have been - that is, the continuous sense of parallel worlds and paths not taken – we receive the play almost as an abstract idea. Each attempt seems to contain every possible production. Absent ideas of characters seem to hover over the heads of those embodying them, almost as if we witness the corruption inherent in the process of actualisation. What we see seems to directly reveal the playwright’s original. There can be no directorial intention, no forced interpretation or imposition, just the play as written and the openly messy particulars on which it is carried.

That said, beyond the refreshed perspective, we learn little that we didn’t already know. The Factory rely on our foreknowledge of the play. We are forced to make our own sense, to complete the jigsaw for ourselves. The form itself offers no comment on the content – any text could be tackled similarly without loss. To watch is to discover anew, but also to clarify, refine and confirm ideas already held.

With this loss of directorial intention comes also a weakening of the narrative arc. Individual scenes may become clarified but the sense of structured development of both characters and plot disappears. The sense of impending tragedy never grows in momentum and both Hamlet’s vengeful desires and his madness seem somewhat scattergun as a result, flashing here and there, but often forgotten. With this, the absence of design, there creeps the slightest hint of monotony.

Does the improvisation become wearisome? Perhaps, but only where it does not fizz with inspiration. As the play proceeds we demand more ingenuity and wit of the actors. Not least because, over time, we spot the presence of preconceived tactics. We begin to doubt the total immediacy as momentary decisions seem born of tactics, as if the company have identified ideal openings for something, anything, to be decided upon and determined that some repeated gesture or other is needed to convey a particular thread of ideas, death, for instance, or madness.

However, given the mammoth nature of the task, such tactics are forgivable by virtue of their necessity. It is harder to excuse the inconsistencies of style. Where at times The Factory seek to play scenes according to naturalistic motivations, at others they play to illustrate and at others still to postulate some concept or other. There is also the sense of opportunities missed in their handling of the audience. After all, part of the joy of improv is our role as challenge-setters. The event could benefit from having even less control over itself.

Nonetheless, it works. It could be improved, but it proves enjoyable, exciting and urgent and demonstrates The Factory as a necessary point on the theatrical landscape. The future development of their practice is worth following with a beady eye, as they are a company underpinned by theatrical enquiry providing a rickety, risky bridge between mainstream and experimentation.

Fussing over Foss

Last Friday, The Stage printed what is, quite frankly, an inexcusable and indefensible dismissal of interactive theatre by critic Roger Foss. Mercifully, this week the industry paper is giving over a similar space for the artistic directors of the BAC, Davids Jubb and Micklem, to respond. While I am looking forward to read their perspective on the importance and vitality of such work, I wanted to get in there first and tear Foss’s argument (of sorts) apart.

Now I don’t lay claim to strictly syllogistic thought processes in my ramblings, but Foss’s argument (of sorts) makes such leaps of logic that it is utterly impossible to spot a route through, let alone follow it. Foss displays a total lack of understanding or, even worse, a positive misunderstanding of the work under discussion. For the most part this results from his tangled confusion over the vocabulary used. More damaging, however, is his stubborn refusal to accept the work on its own terms. No - in fact it’s worse than that. From the start, Foss denies such work the right to even exist. He knows what theatre is and what it does because he’s seen it. It does what it’s always done. End of. Game over. Now, shit off, I’m trying to suspend my disbelief.

Alright, so maybe that’s a little too facetious (if not downright obnoxious), but Foss certainly makes his position obvious from the start. He does not arrive at it through the course of an argument. Instead, he starts out with a definition (of sorts) that rules out anything that doesn’t match a very stringent model.

Foss’s first (and foremost) mistake is to view interactive theatre from the outside: “try and work your thoughts to imagine a theatre where there are no actors and no stage...” By asking us to visualise such a theatre, Foss manages to define an audience as those who watch. To do so is to miss the point of interactive theatre, that it is about doing not watching. Admittedly, there is little to be gained from watching someone take part in, say, Rotazaza’s Wondermart. It would consist in following a ‘shopper’ wearing headphones and an unusual expression of bemused enjoyment as they stalk the aisles of a supermarket. However, Wondermart is not designed to be watched. It exists to be experienced, to be undergone, to be interacted with.

In fact, compare it to the same company’s Etiquette. Here, the jigsaw might well piece together into something concrete or readable, even a narrative of sorts. It functions both from the inside and from the outside, when experienced and when viewed. It is designed in such a way that its being experienced translates into something worth watching. Crucially, however, the two modes of receipt bring about very different understandings of the piece. Almost to the point whereby one could even go so far as to separate experiencing and watching Etiquette entirely.

Having initially pitched himself outside of the work, Foss mistakenly continues with this notion when he comes to examine the experiential aspects. When he writes about what it is to undergo or to take part in interactive theatre, Foss does so in terms associated with making theatre or performing a play. He writes as if there is a distinct, external audience to whom we are performing when we participate. Hence, his use of phrases such as “audience members will play all the roles” or “anyone can become living art” and his subscription to the moniker “citizen-actors.”

The fact is that we are not citizen-actors or performers, but participants. We are not living-art, we are taking part in art. The game, the concept, the structures are the art. The taking part is the experience of it – just as looking at a painting is not itself a work of art – and this experience is itself a product of the art. Suddenly the flaw in Foss’s logic becomes obvious when he writes, “who needs artists or sculptors when you’ve got citizen-statues?” Without the artist, there would be no work. We are merely materials, particularly in the curious choice of example Foss uses: Gormley’s fourth plinth project, One & Other.

Secondly, when we are taking part we do not act, we do. At the heart of both actions is the notion of choice, but the difference them is the nature of those choices. An actor’s choices are governed by aesthetics and a participant’s by ethics. By this I do not mean to infer that performance cannot have ethical motivations nor that everyday actions cannot stems from aesthetic concerns, but that the primary impulse in each case is different. The actor addresses ethics at one remove – choosing how to present ethics aesthetically. The participant must decide how to act in the moment. Of course, this may be governed by aesthetic principles, but even in such events the choice is, first and foremost, an ethical one.

The very best interactive work places the participant in starkly ethical encounters, dilemmas even. On the wheelchair rickshaw that is You, Me, Bum Bum Train, I was genuinely shocked by my own impulsive actions. In the speed of the moment, acting solely on impulse, I threw a punch in a boxing ring and uttered some attempt at Swahili (of which, unsurprisingly, I know nothing) when asked to translate in a press conference situation. In retrospect, both actions are somewhat embarrassing.

But Foss refuses to allow a distinction between good and bad interactive work. When he writes, “whether it’s amazingly brilliant or utterly pointless, non-narrative theatre ticks all those artistically correct boxes for Arts Council England funding wonks,” you feel as though he’s writing not about individual works, but about the genre as a whole. (Of course, his repeated confusion of terms severely undermines his position as mere temerity. The differences between performerless, interactive, automated and non-narrative theatre are too many to name. However, anyone who can write, “the trouble is that there’s no instant label for actor-less theatre. Site-specific? Instalation? Stunt? Happening?” should not be given a platform to call for its abolition. Anyway...)

For Foss the whole form is dismissed as inconsequential play. “I can see some attraction in becoming a kidult and playing with a doll’s house in a romper room for a couple of hours.” The point is that, at its best, interactive theatre is not just a game, but reaches beyond the rules imposed and into life. It remains real. It remains connected with the real world. Unlike Monopoly, for example, game-based theatre is not about winning, but about how you play. It’s looking at both who you choose to be (as defined by your chosen actions) and also who you are. If it’s play, it’s play at its most serious.

Foss’s conclusion stems from fear that interactive theatre will supplant more traditional forms. (You know, stories, stalls and sweets in the interval.) To deny that interactive work has the value of traditional forms is blind and obnoxious. To do so thus, as Foss does, is moronic:

“Don’t let’s kid ourselves that vogue-ish theatrical interactivity is anything more profound than a chance to grab a slice of live, edgy action in a bland, broadband world. Otherwise, we’ll devalue the traditional playwright with a view on life and downgrade the link between author, actor and audience that makes theatre a unique, lived experience.”

Firstly, the two are in no way mutually exclusive. The truth is that we can want both without contradiction and both can happily co-exist. In fact, they need to feed off one another if each is to improve. Secondly, interactive work is arguably more of a “lived experience” than more traditional theatre.

Finally, and most damagingly of all, the world we live in today is dominated by the mediatised and the virtual. The everyday revolves around these forms. We sit in front of screens and absorb more than ever before. So, what’s wrong with a form of theatre that provides something else, something as necessary as traditional theatre was/is to the societies out of which it emerged. Theatre is made for man as social animal, not vice versa. To quote from Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement, what’s wrong with thinking of theatre as “a more prosaic evolutionary adaptation for circumstance: to the gradual increase in the appetite for affect in the screen-world of virtuality, the nostalgia for agency and the consequent retolling for action over reaction, the rediscovery of the potential for pleasure and increased states of excitation...” In short, if interactive theatre fulfils a function in today’s flatscreen society, how can you dismiss it in its entirety?

Recent Musings

You may have noticed that things have slowed down a bit recently. That's not for want of ideas, but for lack of discipline and time. As always. I have several things that I really want to find a bit of space to write about, mainly liveness, but things are just a little hectic. And, having just set a schedule for the next three weeks that means my conscious hours will be filled with working, watching, waking and commuting. Anyway, I thought I'd pop up links to my last few Guardian blogs.

On scratch theatre

Screen to stage

Bird's-eye views

Riding the Bum Bum Train

For some unknown reason, my mind just wandered back to the bizarre, thrilling, sardonic, joyous experience that is You, Me, Bum Bum Train. Embarking on a little web journey of my own, I discovered that the group has won this year's Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, which means that in Summer 2010 we'll be riding the rollercoaster of social situations once again. I can only begin to imagine quite how extraordinary this event could be with £50,000 and a large-scale site behind it. Anyway, in the spirit of congratulations, I thought I'd reflag my review from last November's Cordy House version.

Review: Stillen, Lillian Bayliss Studio

Written for Culture Wars

Described as ‘a wordless play’, Stillen positions itself as a subversion of a traditional model. It sets itself a constraint – to be wordless – to which neither physical theatre nor dance need subscribe, yet it also promises to be a play. That is to say, not an act of wordless play spread over a certain length of time, but a wordless play: a definite article, a constructed whole, a singular unit. A play without words. Billed thus, we can expect subscription to – or, at the very least, suggestions of – certain modal or structural conventions.

Only Stillen doesn’t look or feel at all like a play – at least not in our own, peculiarly English vocabulary of theatre. We might more readily term it performance or theatre, on the grounds of its weaving structure, dizzying ambiguity and, accordingly, the impossibility of tallying its segments into full-bodied narrative(s). There is enough representation within to read individual fragments as if scenes, but any hope of narrative correspondence or connection is beyond reach. Instead, it seems more an exploration, a presentation or a theatrical essay. Yet, if it chooses to call itself a play, we must find some way of handling it as such.

While I wouldn’t want to lumber the form with any necessary qualities, by mooting narrative, fiction, representation or other such property as essential to a piece’s being a play, I do believe that plays necessarily exist in multiple forms. To talk of performing a performance is needlessly tautological, yet we can talk of performing a play. Play and performance can be thought of as distinct. As a wordless play, therefore, Stillen still has a text of some manner. Like Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, the text consists solely of physical instructions or, in the common parlance, stage directions. We are watching an enactment (or performance) of the text (or, if you prefer, fixed score) and, as such, there can be no definitive version. (Unlike devised work where any performance is definitive of that particular stage in the work’s process.)

With this in mind, we can readily separate performer from role. Onstage, in various combinations and interactions, are a man and a woman, an old man and an old woman, a child (more precisely, a young girl) and a man whose face is covered with plasters, stripping him of sight. We know another performer could step into each of the roles without creating a new part and so, for all that it may appear to be the case, at no point do these performers play themselves. Instead, they play the text and in doing so each stands in for a species of humanity (and, together, for humanity as a species) before they exist as specimens of it.

Stillen’s concern is one we all share, namely, what it is to be embodied. Translated, the title becomes ‘Suckle’ and in the variously-shaped human forms before us, which seem to grow oddly sturdier with age, we see the path from birth to death. Though it seems to writhe with an existential angst, cursing our imprisonment and imperfections, Stillen maintains an oddly calming, almost meditative, streak. It draws great comfort from the absolute mutuality of our predicament – our equality in isolation – and the catharsis of these shared anxieties through physical contact. Hell may be other people, but they are also the Good Samaritans that make it bearable.

Lotte van der Berg’s choreography ticks all manner of boxes, such that you can almost see the mind-map of ideas. There are frissons of foreplay alongside lashings of aggression. One lends her eyes to another, guiding him across the stage, and another relies on someone else’s mouth to chew. They hang off each other and collide; dance, kiss and strike; become entranced by one another; become repelled. Yet, as it churns through this assortment, there is none of the clunking awkwardness that so often drags down such broad explorations. Instead, the piece has a fluidity, whereby no segment ever feels a self-contained sketch designed to hit one point alone, and the soft obscurity of the images gives them leave to exist only half-graspable.

The real coup is the combination of materiality and viscerality at play. We absorb the sensations of the bodies before us and leave longing for the touch of another. But this craving can only come if counterbalanced by the quiet horrors of isolation and this is van der Berg’s real triumph.

Her stage seems at first a Mediterranean terrace of terracotta, but reveals itself to be tiled with soap bars. On the addition of water – in a stunning, sodden moment that recalls a new-born struggling against a tide of amniotic fluid – the surface is made slippery and those that step on it must struggle against it gracelessly. Once upset thus, it can never be restored or repaired, just as we, on attaining self-conscious distinct of body and self, can never return to that state of naivety. Everything becomes difficult. Everything is impossible. Everything is imperfect.

The subject itself is as slippery as its treatment and Stillen will conjure many things in many minds, but it is undeniably powerful and thought-provoking stuff. However, the indefinite metaphors and density of suggested possibilities, make it a gripping ninety minutes marked as much by revulsion as tranquility.