LIFT Blog: Theatre & the Arab World

Written for the LIFT Blog

Reading an interview with the New York based actor Danny Hoch on the tube home last night, I came across the following: “I think there should be a revolution: the people of New York City should take over Broadway and kick everyone else out because theatre is supposed to be for the people. Broadway and off-Broadway are not for us; there are ten million people in the city and the majority of us live in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Upper and Lower Manhattan and Queens. Yet the shows on Broadway in New York are about riverboats in Mississippi and the audiences that come to see the shows are also from Mississippi. Off-Broadway theatre is no better, with its stories about struggling suburban upper-middle-class families, playing to an audience also from the suburbs. Why don’t the show those plays out in the suburbs? Why don’t the Mississippi people have their Mississippi plays in Mississippi?”

In terms of audience, theatre is constrained by time and place. Its audience is necessarily limited. Auditoriums and other spaces can only hold so many people. Those that fill them must be co-present at a particular time, in a particular place. That means that the majority of any audience will live in a certain vicinity of the theatre that they are attending. Theatre, therefore, is a local medium. It would seem to follow, as Hoch demands, that theatres have a duty to reflect the needs and concerns of their audience. In other words, theatres ought to tackle local issues.

At one level, that would seem to negate international work. Why ought LIFT – a festival defined by its location in London – present work that is so concerned with elsewhere? In choosing to turn focus on the Middle and Near East and North Africa, isn’t Mark Ball ignoring the needs of his audience? Following Hoch’s argument, might we not even go so far as to call for the abolishment of LIFT?

Clearly, the answer is an emphatic no. To do so would be to fill our theatres with plays about knife-crimes, nationalism and MPs expenses scandals. It would be to elevate state of the nation – no worse than that, the state of the individual – to pole position. After all, why should I – a middle-class, white, male twenty-something – care about what it might mean to be a black teenager or a disabled former soldier or a grieving mother? Where’s the theatre that reflects my experiences and concerns? (Must I be confined to the Royal Court?)

No. Theatre is about empathy. It is about the perspective of others, as much as it is a reflection of the self. Theatre has an extraordinary capacity to present locales. When played the context of the locale itself, its purpose and meaning is vastly different to a performance in another context, in another city, in another country. Theatre’s meaning – art’s meaning – is necessarily fluid and relative.

Work like Aftermath and Hobb Story affords us and exposes us to a viewpoint on the lives of others, lives lived elsewhere. Theatre allows us to see the world without straying too far from home. Sure, it’s no replacement for travel. Any theatre that portrays a location or lifestyle that I have not had opportunity to experience will, of course, reflect my preconceptions. In Continuous City, Deb speaks of the familiarity of London after watching to Ab Fab and Ross’s wedding trip in Friends. But, crucially, it also has the power to change those preconceptions and shift them on their axis. That is, to tell it as it is or, rather, as it is seen, and alter our understanding accordingly. It becomes a part of our preconceptions. That reflects this desire of artists to tell their own story and want their voices to be heard that cropped up at last Thursday’s talk. “Don’t assume,” they tell us, “Let us explain. Let us show you.”

Besides, what LIFT proves is that London must be defined by its position within the world at large. Continuous City and Life Streaming shatter the idea that London can ever exist as a bubble of self-concern. Mark Ball spoke of the region’s geopolitical importance on Thursday and there’s no denying that it affects us and is of concern to us as Londoners. Hoch’s argument, for all its admirable tenacity and virtuousness, must be seen as a simplistic view of a complex whole.

LIFT Blog: On Gaming as Theatre

Written for the LIFT Blog

Can computer games be art? It’s a debate that has been rumbling on for years: delve the depths of the internet and you’ll find passionate advocacy of the aesthetic properties of Tetris, for example. In recent years, thanks to technological quantum leaps, that question has become more mainstream. Where computer games were once mere obstacle courses in which individual challenges were either passed or failed, many are now open-ended structures. Games such as Grand Theft Auto, The Sims or Red Dead allow such freedom that the player must decide how he or she wishes to play the game.

That choice is, arguably, a moral one. Certainly when one makes the jump to social gaming – online multiplayer modes, Second Life or World of Warcraft – the ethical nature of one’s choice increases enormously. One’s own play affects that of others. The virtual impacts upon the real.

We are, I think, tackling a similar question with the non-virtual gaming currently being presented in an artistic context as theatrical or as theatre. As a form, the game as theatre (by which I mean participatory models rather than spectating) is in its infancy. That form, I believe, has a great deal of aesthetic potential. But if it is to fulfil that potential, it must draw on its ethical dimension.

Tassos Stevens, a co-director of the agency of adventure Coney, delivered an advocacy of play at Wonderlab (which you can read in full here), in which he described play as “make believe at the double.” It relies on the multiplicity between ‘what is’ and ‘what if’: Play, he says, is “the distance between these two spheres of what if and what is, it’s a dynamic space, sparking like the electrical storm of Van der Graaf.” I like that a lot, but I’d playmakers and gamedesigners must ensure that the connection runs back and forth between the two spheres. To leap from what is to what if is not enough. We do that when sat in the dark watching a drama. Participation requires us to go from what is to what if and back again.

I suppose I’m saying that it’s not merely enough to get us playing. You have to make us look back at our behaviour and question the choices we made during play. You have to leave something lingering and change the world (if only for a while).

At the same time, the game as played (ie the experiential) must be more than the game as a set of rules or instructions (ie the structure or concept). That is, it is only by actually playing or participating in the game that we get a full experience of it. It’s not enough to read the rules and understand the artist’s point. (Hutong, a game in which two rectangular routes of identical proportions are walked in different cities, suffers from this. The concept of connection is made clear by the rules, but never really furthered by being experienced.)

At the moment, there are games that do and there are games that don’t. Walking (S)miles by Present Attempt (and in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit to being a former member of the company), which yields discoveries about the world only when played seriously and intently. You notice not just the rarity of smiling at strangers (which occurs to you from the rules alone), but also the different types of smile and the range of motivations behind smiles. The city changes when seen through this filter: not full of passing people, but potential smiles. And to look back is to realise that you’ve treated people as means to an end and, probably, devalued the nature of a smile.

There are many other examples: Coney’s A Small Town Anywhere – a toy world that demands reflection on behaviour within; Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke; Third Ring Out by Metis Arts; You Me Bum Bum Train, currently on at the Barbican and many more.

Perhaps all this is to forget the pure aesthetic properties of play. After all, there’s beauty in a game played skilfully or inventively. Isn’t that why chess tournaments dish out trophies for ‘Best Game’?

The form is growing up. So what do we want from our games as theatre? Is it enough just to play or must we demand that games demand more?

LIFT Blog: The Climate for Theatre

Written for the LIFT blog

I’ll start with the unspeakable. My feelings on theatre about climate change are not dissimilar to Charles Spencer’s opinion of Mother Courage: “Here she comes again, Mother Courage and her bloody cart, condemning audiences to three-and-a-quarter hours of hectoring lectures, unrepentant Marxism, tiresome alienation devices and a bucketful of condensed misery. It is enough to make you pull the duvet over your head and turn your face to the wall.”

That, I suppose, makes me a major element of last Thursday’s LIFT Talk at the ICA, entitled The Climate for Theatre. For the most part, the conversation circled the relationship of practitioners to a subject, dubbed, I suspect, with a hint of bias: “the biggest issue of our time.” Why isn’t there more theatre tackling the issue? Is theatre an appropriate medium for this particular message? How does theatre make a difference? Does it?

What struck me, however, was the reluctance to turn the topic on its head and consider us: the audience. After all, when theatre plays to an empty space, it’s quite unlikely to have an effect or spread a message. Alongside that, in its most conventional form (i.e. playing in an auditorium to an audience of necessarily limited numbers), theatre can only speak directly to its audience. Any message, any cause, is contained by that limitation. Beyond that, the audience must freely choose to attend of their own accord. Theatre cannot frog-march us into an auditorium. The best it can do is to attract us, like moths to a light. The implication, therefore, is that it can theatre can only attract those pre-disposed to it, just as moths are drawn to light by nature. Theatre that wears its message publicly, as part of, say, its marketing campaign, will inevitably find itself preaching to the converted.

If theatre wants to tackle climate change, it must ask itself how it can attract people like me. If it is intent of sticking with the conventional format, that probably gives it three options. The first is purely a question of quality, that is, by becoming a ‘must see,’ a piece of theatre will attract an audience regardless of content. The second and third are less palatable, either to sugar the pill or to disguise it like a mother chopping vegetables into imperceptible slivers to ‘health up’ a sauce. My reservation, I suppose, is that this seems to involve tricking audiences into the auditorium.

The upshot of this is that if theatre wants to spread a message – whether climate change or otherwise – it needs to leave the auditorium. It can’t afford to wait for an audience to come it’s way; it must go to the audience. After all, weren’t we talking about this select sliver of 40,000 when discussing The Epic and the Intimate. Doesn’t that seem miniscule in the face of a disintegrating planet? For all that I baulked – like a good, little champagne socialist – at John Jordan’s description of the disruption of a power plant, I share his basic philosophy that, in order to really make a difference, theatre needs to happen in the real world. Or, to put it another way, it must stop acting and start acting. The question is at what point does it stop being theatre?

LIFT Blog: The Epic & The Intimate

Written for the LIFT Blog

At Thursday’s LIFT talk, inclusively titled The Epic and The Intimate, there seemed to be polite consensus that the miniscule was as capable as conjuring grand moments as the enormous was of speaking on a personal level. While I won’t deny that, it sounded to me much like the sort of harmonious accord that stems from an aversion to treading on toes. By which I mean that the fear of causing offence or belittling another type of work tempers the defence of one’s own. Even Adrian Howells, who in the words of Lyn Gardner “effectively lobbed a hand grenade through the proscenium arch,” seemed reluctant to take wholehearted ownership of his argument, mitigating it as devil’s advocacy. Given, however, that no one took up Lyn’s challenge to return fire on Adrian, I offer the following in the same spirit of divisive thought experiment.

I don’t believe audiences are interested in intimacy. I don’t buy this repeated assertion that, as our communication with one another becomes increasingly dominated by mediatisation and virtual exchange, we’re flocking to this type of theatre in search of real, human connections. After a hard day spent texting, tweeting, and status-updating, who gets home with a craving for an interactive, intimate theatrical experience? Who, when looking for a real human encounter, sets off to the theatre? Who, in a moment of loneliness, thinks, “If only Adrian Howells were here to give me a bath”?

None of this is to deny intimacy its place in theatre of this kind, whether as a concept, an experience or an object of enquiry. Nor is it to write off the possibility of genuine intimate encounters (or, at least, moments) in the framed setting of performance. Rather I wish to warn against overstating its importance as a motivating factor for attendance. There are two ways to look at the newfound popularity of this branch of theatre: one is amongst artists, the other is amongst audiences. Certainly, intimacy is, for reasons already touched on, a legitimate and important question for the former. Audiences, I propose, come at the work from a different angle.

I suspect audiences are interested in themselves. The draw to so-called intimate theatre is that it’s personal. It’s tailor-made. It’s bespoke. It’s about them and it’s theirs. I’d argue that we’ve become so accustomed to being the centre of our own worlds that we’ve started to expect that of our theatre. Consider the specificity of internet advertising. Or the way in which cultural institutions, corporate companies, even political parties, approach us directly armed with enough knowledge to do so on a seemingly personal and individual level.

After all, thanks to video games, we’re used to being the hero. With reality television, we know that anyone can be the centre of attention. So is work of this nature pandering to that desire? Does it – just as Noel Edmonds repeatedly reminds contestants on Deal or No Deal that it’s their game – rely on the fact that it belongs to us alone? Is this theatre for the iGeneration?

We must remember that artists and audiences have different perspectives on the work in question. Artists get to see the spectrum of audiences responses, where audiences only get to experience and respond the once. Accordingly while artists can get a wider sense of what intimacy means to people, audiences are content to have a seemingly personal experience whether intimate or epic in scale. Might we be just as happy sat alone in the Olivier auditorium?

LIFT Blog: We The People

Written for the LIFT Blog

The People, Johanna told us in the midst of Thursday night’s revolution, are called Tim. They’ve come from Elephant & Castle.

Had she enquired, she might have been able to tell us that The People write plays; quite formally innovative plays at that. She might have told us that The People’s plays have won awards. Or that the reason that The People were in Elephant & Castle was that their latest work-in-progress was being performed in an uninhabited shop in a run-down shopping centre as part of a Royal Court scheme to reach new audiences.

The People, in other words, are very much onside. The People are one of us.

Gob Squad’s Revolution Now!, for those that didn’t see it, attempts to incite a real world revolution – even if only in a single person – from within the theatre. It tries to affect the world beyond the performance itself. It does that by broadcasting a call to arms via a single television placed outside and attempting to persuade a member of the public to act on our behalf by launching a conspicuously bourgeois Molotov cocktail (a Moet-ov cocktail, perhaps?) at the building.

Looking around the audience on Thursday night, there were an awful lot of familiar faces. Of those cooped up in the ICA that evening, a significant proportion are actively involved in theatre, performance and/or live art. Around the stalls were dotted practitioners and producers, curators, critics and commentators.

That our newest recruit, the one person outside moved into action, should be Tim Crouch is an irony not easily missed. It’s all too straightforward to stretch Gob Squad’s piece into a metaphor for a whole wave of performance. After all, isn’t this kind of work deliberately and self-consciously forward-thinking? Who then is this ‘revolution’ reaching? Is it playing into a bubble? For all our talk about ‘the audience’, are we just talking about one another?

Personally, I was reminded of two things. Firstly, my previous visit to the ICA for Some of the Futures (part of the Futures and Past weekend concocted by Tim Ethcells and Ant Hampton), during which I was awarded Best Audience Member 2010 in Kim Noble’s performance lecture. Secondly, a Peachy Coochy at the Riverside in 2008 given by Lois Kieden (who was herself amongst Thursday’s audience), in which she presented twenty photographs of audiences and identified individuals therein according to their artistic practices, positions and achievements. Though she couldn’t have pointed me out, I spotted myself and my own company in one shot taken at that year’s Spill Festival.

Of course, all this is not to discourage artists from watching each other’s work. That’s hugely important, of course. Nor is it unaware of the near-impossibility of actually identifying or counting the ‘anonymous public’ attendees. Rather it is to raise a few questions: Is any of this problematic? If not, why not? If so, what’s to be done?

LIFT Blog: Digital Democracy

Written for the LIFT Blog

Given the steadfast devotion to its development, you could be forgiven for imagining technology to have intrinsic value. Were that the case it would be an end in and of itself, worth chasing for its own sake. Of course, technology’s value is not intrinsic, but instrumental. Any technology – and we must take care to recognise the term’s own multiplicity – can only be a means to an end. It can, as Unlimited Theatre took pains to remind us in their 2007 performance lecture The Ethics of Progress, be as easily used for bad as for good. Take splitting the atom, say Unlimited. Take chatroulette, say I (to get all 2010 about it).

This was the recurring motif of last Thursday’s LIFT Talk – the first of four throughout the festival – under the title ‘Digital Democracy’.

The debate about technology’s value has raised its head already within the work being shown by LIFT. The Builders Association’s Continuous City turned out to be both a treatise on and a polemic against the ubiquity of online communication. Though, formally, it didn’t actually seem to make live use of the internet, in terms of content it is resolute in its convictions that these communicative tools are hindering genuine, meaningful communication. Or perhaps it’s merely flagging up our innate inability to truly communicate, regardless of the technology. It’s a thesis directly contradicted by Dries Verhoeven’s Life Streaming, which creates a connection over 8805km between you and a performer in Sri Lanka. Its more than just a conversation, Verhoeven manages to make you feel as though you’re sharing the same space, the same atmosphere, the same sensations. The question always remains, however, to what extent are we projecting that experience? How real is that connection? How shared is that experience?

During Thursday’s debate, Matt Evans, co-founder of Blast Theory, stressed that theatre’s application of both digital technology and interactivity, which has more or less sprung up alongside it, is in urgent need of critiquing. Rather than simply drooling over the newfangled, we need to analyse and judge its use within or as art according to aesthetic principles. I think he’s absolutely right and it’s a warning that needs heeding by practitioners, curators, critics and audiences alike.

It's worth remembering that neither technology nor interactivity (and I mean that in a stronger sense than mere co-presence) are necessary for theatre. As with any form or content placed onstage, practitioners choose to employ these tools and methods. They could equally choose not to.

In which case, I’d like to beg two questions for discussion in the comment section below:

If it is merely an alternative option – no more or less valuable in and of itself – is it ever justifiable to use technology where one could just as easily not?

What differentiates good interactivity in theatre from bad interactivity?

LIFT Blog: On Festivals

Written for the LIFT blog

All festivals, whether overtly religious or entirely secular, are somehow holy. Holiness is the mark of otherness and festivals are periods of time set aside for something. Those days, weeks or months are ring-fenced from usual proceedings and everyday life. They’re designated for something else, something extra-ordinary, something other than.

That quality of segregation also implies a singularity of some sort. The ‘other than’ of a particular festival doesn’t refer to anything other than, but a specific other than. The different elements of or within a festival are tied together by their existence in this consecrated space/time, by their presentation under a collective label. These different events and occurrences make up a whole, inferring that the sum is more than its constituent parts, which collaborate and converse with one another, like songs on a well-considered mix-tape. Our challenge, as audience (or, rather, as festival-goers), is to find a route through and make connections.

Sometimes the object of celebration (or investigation or distillation or clarification) that binds the individual parts of a festival together is immediately obvious. Festivals such as the RSC’s Complete Works Festival or the BAC’s forthcoming One on One Festival make clear their overarching objectives from the start. Other festivals, such as the uncurated free-for-all that is the Edinburgh Fringe, allow their own definition, recurring themes and motifs to emerge as they take place. LIFT, it seems to me, sits somewhere between the two.

The events that will pepper the next four weeks have been deliberately chosen to sit alongside one another and yet the (most basic) criteria behind their selection – theatre, international, London – make for a broad church. Some will chime harmoniously together (like distant ice-creams van crying their peculiar whale-song across a suburb) and others will be discordant and antagonistic. At the same time, each of us will have our own peculiar route through. Where some of us will experience only one of the festival’s offerings, others will see the entire programme.

But a festival is much more than a collection of works presented. For most of LIFT’s duration, in fact, you won’t be able to actually experience any of the work at all. Even then, though, we remain in the consecrated space of festival mode; still celebrating, still investigating.

All of this makes the gaps between and around the works – of which this blog is a particular example, so please do comment, connect and polemicize – massively important. When explaining the principles of open space, Phelim McDermot, co-artistic director of Improbable Theatre, always stresses that the most important conversations often happen by the coffee machine, at the bar or on pavements strewn with cigarette ends. It is these conversations that will make sense of LIFT as a whole by emerging out of and building connections across the gaps.

LIFT, then, is whole, holy and also full of holes. That’s where we – the audience, the festival-goers – come in. Please mind the gaps.

Review: What Every Woman Knows, Finborough Theatre

Written for Time Out

Written at the height of the suffragette movement, What Every Woman Knows is not, as its male protagonist believes, 'the tragedy of a man who has found himself out.' Rather, it is his wife's story. JM Barrie - creator of the eminently sensible Wendy Darling - suggests not only that behind ever great man is a great woman, but that he is incapable of turning around to see her.

That man is John Shand, a promising, humourless politician bound into marriage as part of a pact of patronage. His wife, Maggie, endures that lopsided union with quiet dignity, deflecting all her acheivements on to him. Though she types - and tweaks - his speeches, Shand believes a guardian angel to be watching over him and, eventually, elopes with a young girl fit for the cover of Horse & Hound.

Barrie's absolute opposition of gender - whereby masculine over-confidence is set against silent self-effacement - might seem naive today, but it builds to devastating effect. Once the plot pares down after a protracted set-up, here over-directed to compensate - it reaches terminal velocity thanks to the performances of Gareth Glen and Madeleine Worrall as husband and wife.

Worrall, in particular, is perfectly restrained. As Maggie manoeuvres her own cuckolding, she seems held together only by her skin, eventually allowing herself a single, private sob. This is her tragedy and, finally, her vindication for all her sex.

Review: Susurrus, Holland Park as part of Gate Outdoors

Written for Culture Wars

Though it may ‘quickly dream away the time,’ David Leddy’s Susurrus works out as little more than a stroll with enhanced aesthetics. Armed with a map of Holland Park, on which are marked eight checkpoints, you wonder deeper and deeper into the greenery while four intersecting monologues seep gently into your ears.

Each of these muses on and mirrors A Midsummer Night’s Dream, picking up its refrains wherever possible without cramming them in forcefully. There’s a man who talks about a breakdown and a woman who talks of her father’s death. There’s a shrill pensioner, who speaks of Benjamin Britten’s opera (which accompanies you as you move from point to point) and an odd male voice who lectures on the anatomy of starlings when dissected. Perhaps they fit together, perhaps their overlaps are merely coincidental.

Their soft Scottish sibilance purrs away, soothing and gentle. So relaxing, in fact, that it near empties your brain of thoughts. A bit like a cleaning cassette, the words wash through your ears, cleansing, but quickly forgotten.

The trouble is that is rather hard to care about the experience of others – especially absent others – when you’re having a rather pleasant experience of your own. As with so much audio-work, the presence of a soundtrack heightens receptivity to your surroundings and their atmosphere. But then, so does an iPod on shuffle, if you let it. By placing what is essentially a radio play on location, Leddy detracts from his own writing, which I suspect, would benefit from a more concentrated listening experience.

Of course, that would mean losing the recurring sense of woodland magic, which is inherited from the Dream rather than really transformed by Leddy’s text. This, it seems to me, is Susurrus’s sole success: it turns a promenade into a meandering dream. Like dreams, however, the meaning of it is hard to pin down and, by the time your eyes re-open, it’s more or less faded from memory.

Review: Domini Public, National Theatre (with the Gate Theatre)

Written for Culture Wars

From the census arises a picture of a nation torn apart. In the square outside the National Theatre, a civil war erupts out of the differences within a group of strangers. Londoners turn against non-Londoners, prisoners are executed by police and, amidst the resultant bodies, one man in the fifty-strong crowd kneels to demonstrate his belief in god or a higher being.

Roger Bernat's Domini Public (trans. The Public Domain) begins gently, using headphones to pose a series of questions to which we are asked to respond physically. Those that live North of the River Thames move to the right; those south of it, head left. The two groups face each other down in an amicable stand-off. Fists are raised signifying knowledge of the national anthem, hands cover the eyes of those that slept with the light on. People that lived at home for more than twenty years position themselves close to someone older.

Gradually, the questions grow into a barrage. All of a sudden, you find yourself divided by salary, head in hand having lied to get out of sex or walking across the square testifying to having mistrusted an Arab. These are public confessions made in a city square, seen (though not understood) by onlookers. Those playing understand – or, at least, believe they understand, for one cannot be sure that everyone is responding to the same questions – the implications of your actions. Sometimes, there’s a twang of shame. Sometimes, there’s comfort in the shared confessionals. Sometimes, those things that you prized lose their value. Almost all of us, for example, believe that we are talented. Most have been on television.

Wisely, the game includes an element of reflexivity, questioning us about how we’re playing. Hands up if you’ve answered all the questions truthfully. Move forward if you’ve gone with the majority when undecided. At one point, we step across the square from left to right according to the cultural activities undertaken last week. Afterwards, once the scale is complete, the voice accuses: “Do you always have to be first?”

But it’s when our responsive physical actions become consumed by and translated into an emerging fiction that Domini Public really takes flight. Relatively early on, we are invited to don a coloured jacket according to our birthplace: London (orange), the rest of the UK (blue) or overseas (yellow). The voice in our ear, uncharacteristically urgent in tone as if narrating a chase, denotes us prisoners, police and Red Cross workers. Suddenly, the square is transformed into a battleground as our stand-off takes on new meaning. Raised fists and hands on hearts become aggressive, tribal and (strangely) earnest. Arbitrary divisions spawn mock executions and – in one genuinely uncomfortable moment – a symbolic rape of a prisoner by a guard. From here the spectacle grows until, finally, the square is littered with corpses and mourners.

It is, perhaps, more impressive from the outside, viewed – as it must be – with an incompete understanding of the driving forces at play. Yet from within it is a touch underwhelming, petering out without offering a truly grandiose climax. It’s almost as if the square is not enough: it should be the whole city. Mischievous and delightful that it is, Domini Public misses the sense of stomach-swelling euphoria that participatory work can achieve.

I have, in the past, complained of feeling dragged through audio-tours and audio-instructed participation. They have a tendency to feel like monorails, whereby we blandly follow orders and tread a well-worn path as dictated by the routemaster or puppeteer artist. Though it can feel deceptively active, the experience is essentially a passive one. Our role is dictated and to take action or choose an alternative is to scupper the whole by refusing to play along.

Domini Public, however, provides a novel alternative. By using questions and answers to orchestrate our movements, it gives up the need to stage-manage precisely. Rather than moving individuals around a game board, it trusts us to move ourselves. Given that our actions denote our individual opinions, histories and personalities, we absolutely own those actions in spite of their being prompted or instructed. We must take responsibility for ourselves: what we have done, who we are and how we play. (There is, of course, no need to answer honestly. Indeed, certain questions are provocative enough that honesty feels a daring action; one easily circumnavigated by a lie.)

Of course, who we are and how we play defines the game and allows divisions to emerge. We are cut and recut, ordered and re-ordered, shuffled like a pack of cards until you realise, perhaps, that each of us has a place and a voice. Add them together and you have a whole, neither united nor divided, but rather assorted. It’s noise – our various voices – is a glorious cacophony.

Review: A Game of You, One on One Festival at BAC

If Internal presents you with a distorting fairground mirror, A Game of You walks you inside an infinity triangle. Everywhere you look there’s an image of yourself reflected back. Moreover, it provides unwarped, honest reflections from every possible angle. Even looking at other people comes to reflect you more than it does them. You see a population of selves, affording you what feels like an outside perspective on the markedly familiar.

Now I ought to admit to needing certain things from A Game of You, which is not a situation that one finds oneself in often as a critic. Somehow, I needed it to make sense of my own bruising experience of Internal; almost to the extent of providing closure or catharsis in some way. Thankfully, that’s exactly what I got. A Game of You provides a well-balanced perspective, allowing you to see things from both sides, as subject and spectator. Even as you look at yourself as others might see you, you come to understand that very process of looking. It has the effect of demystifying the gaze of others, rendering it null and void, powerless to paralyze. Yes, there are moments of discomfort, just as mirror images contain negative aspects as well as positive, but the overall effect is quite comforting in its honesty. What we think of as bad bits and good bits, you come to realise, are all just bits.

We enter one by one at five minute intervals. Again we know ourselves to be part of a conveyor belt, having sat waiting beforehand, watching others enter the machine. To fully explain the mechanics, as with all of Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy, would be to break the show, but once again the company slowly reveal their hand. What you thought to be one thing eventually proves otherwise, until eventually you come full circle and leave with the whole picture. Safe to say, it’s an incredibly cleverly constructed journey, with each segment fitting beautifully into place, elucidating that which has preceded it and simultaneously setting up what’s to come. The dramaturgy is exquisite.

As a piece it deconstructs you to put you back together. What you put in is what comes back at you. In that, there’s no spin and no manipulation of material. Admittedly, that has the effect of making it a more muted, gentle experience than either Internal or The Smile Off Your Face. The recompense, however, is the plain-faced honesty of the reflection. A Game of You manages to be reflexive without cornering you into an extreme situation that twists your arm into reflection.

Yet this is not, I suspect, a show designed primarily to illuminate the self. Rather it serves to negate exactly that need. True, it shows that we reveal ourselves through our behaviour, both consciously and unconsciously, but it also shows that leaked information to be illegible, at least in any objective sense. In asking us both to judge and be judged, it is judgement itself that comes under the microscope and proves, precisely as the title implies, an exercise in subjective projection.

Wise and witty, A Game of You makes a calm and considered conclusion to a turbulent trilogy.

Review: Aspects of Love, Menier Chocolate Factory

Written for Time Out

Returning to Aspects of Love after his original West End staging was deemed overblown in 1989, Trevor Nunn opts for simplicity second time around. For the most part, it works fairly well, albeit without ever really inspiring.

Rather than demanding rousing, memorable numbers like the soaring signature Love Changes Everything, the Menier's intimacy allows Lloyd Webber's score its intelligent cartwheel of subtle refrains. Even scaled down and more supple, however, Nunn's production can't overcome the problems within the narrative, which is glazed with rose-tinted nostalgia and goes searching for answers towards the end.

Nineteen and naive, Alex (Michael Arden, superbly boyish and charming) falls for a French actress (Katherine Kingsley), whisking her off to his uncle George's countryside villa, only for her to become caught between conflicting affections. Eventually she marries George (Dave Willetts), who continues an affair with an Italian scuplturer, and their daughter - now 15 - fawns on the returned Alex. By the time Alex and the sculpturer have had their roll in the hay, ticking off amorous connections has overtaken the narrative thrust of David Garnett's original novella.

David Farley's design plays smartly on memory and art, giving the villa a sense of kiln-fired poterry and projected landscapes in a dreamy, watercolour haze, but his reliance on snapshots for scene-setting strips events of their specificity and mutes the intensity of the various passions.

Response: I Vow to Thee, One on One Festival at BAC

One of the best features of work that treats its audience on an individual basis is the manner in which it can have a lingering and longstanding effect on life at large. Simon Bowes of Kings of England does exactly that with I Vow to Thee, by asking his audience members to make a promise.

Entering a makeshift office of sorts, in which Bowes sits behind a trestle table with a pile of empty forms, you sit yourself opposite the artist. Bowes explains the piece and its origins in the recent tagline of the election: the Big Society. He wants to make Britain a better place and is asking each of us to do our bit, whatever that might be. We talk through possibilities and Bowes makes an instructive and insightful advisor, guiding your hand without ever forcing it. What might we want to commit to? What are we able to commit to?

By filling out the form, which is laid out like a contractual agreement, one cements a promise in writing. It solidifies the moment of commitment like a flashbulb scorching a moment onto film. Afterwards, when you notice yourself transgressing that pledge, it has a habit of jerking back into memory and your behaviour realigns accordingly. I Vow to Thee makes us better people, at least in theory, and does it’s little, tiny bit to swing the country’s moral barometer to the good.

One thing that I Vow To Thee flags up, however, is the difference between the perspectives of artist and audience with this type of work. Necessarily so, of course, but there remains a slightly unsavoury aftertaste about that. For all that these one on one experiences feel personal, they are in fact mass-produced. Just as Build-a-Bear Workshops, found in shopping malls the country over, leave each child with a unique teddy bear of their own making, the process remains a production line, albeit open and adaptable. (It is awareness and self-conscious demonstration of this that makes Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy so powerful and honest.)

Here, Bowes keeps his archive of previous vows on the table for perusal, both as a tool for decision and for interest sake. There were around 140 by the time I undertook mine and that figure is likely to have passed 200 by now. He is open about the piece’s own history in the same way that Barnaby Stone incorporates it with the pegs of previous participants showing up in your slice of Oak.

Yet what concerns me slightly about Bowes’ contract is – as so often – the small print. In order to receive the ongoing “encouragement, mentoring, support (or even actual help) in the fulfilment of my Vow,” each of us has to give consent for the contract to be used “in future promotion or documentation” of the piece. In other words, we (the audience) and he (the artist) get different things out of this treaty.

Though I don’t wish to question the integrity behind Bowes’s intentions, it reminds me of David Hoyle’s On the Couch, which played as part of the Chelsea Theatre’s recent Sacred Festival. Presented as a piece in its own right, On the Couch was little more than a gathering of material for Hoyle’s other piece Theatre of Therapy. Yes, Hoyle had stated that this might be the case in promotional material, but – by virtue of its presentation as a piece in its own right – one expects its motivations to be less singularly exploitative and cynical.

Of course, Boyes doesn’t go that far (at least, I hope not), but he does have a viewpoint across the spectrum, where we only see our own encounter. We have given of ourselves in the course of the piece and, while we (and, in this case others/the country at large) may benefit from that, Bowes benefits in a different way. He gains a wealth of potential material, promotional or otherwise, for his own future practice.

But then, perhaps that’s just the way life works. Isn’t it a series of mutually beneficial contracts made together but taken in different directions? The thing is I Vow to Thee feels like a pact made with myself, a personal promise, rather than one with the artist himself. Bowes appears to be a conduit or catalyst, but turns out to be rather more complicit.

Response: Soldiers' Song, One on One Festival at BAC

Step into the inauspicious crate in the foyer of the Battersea Arts Centre and you’re confronted with a quiet dilemma: to sing or to listen. The dominate feature of Quarantine’s soundproof booth is a microphone stood in its centre. The far wall houses a screen, on which appear videos of six different servicemen and women singing a song, karaoke-style directly to camera. At the bottom, the lyrics appear. Beneath is a menu of six buttons, each labelled by both performer and song-title. The choice, as in karaoke, is ours.

It is, I suppose, an issue of respect. These men and women cannot be seen detached from the regulation kit they wear and, accordingly, the danger in which they place themselves. At one level, the set up invites you to join in with the soldier, as if an experience of solidarity. The actual effect, on account of the recorded nature of their singing, is to drown them out. It is to be more interested by your own performance than theirs. To listen and watch, however, is to feel the pull of the microphone, as if you’re leaving them hanging. In a way, it encapsulates a central problem of one on one or interactive performance: how to interact honestly without feeling that you might be derailing the performance as constructed or intended?

Beyond that central conflict, however, there’s little to Quarantine’s piece. By allowing you ten minutes to wheel through different on screen options, a certain amount of channel-hopping dilettantism is encouraged. While the impulse to see some of it all, rather than all of some – stopping one performance midflow in the process – is interesting, I wonder whether more might be achieved by limiting us to a single song, allowing one soldier to stand for all.

Ultimately, though, the piece can’t overcome the limitations of its own mediatised status. There’s only so much responsibility one can feel towards technology. Can you really ever offend or respect a video recording? Can you call it an experience, whether sharing or shunning, when your opposite number is so defined by their absence? Besides, thus alone, there’s no one but yourself to witness or judge your actions within. In the end, Soldiers’ Song doesn’t really make any demands of you, beyond those you project upon yourself.

Response: Rendez-Vous, One on One Festival at BAC

Villanella and Hanneke Paauwe have forgotten that a gentle tug at our heartstrings is far more effective than an attempt to induce a full-on cardiac arrest. Rather than heeding the old adage that holding back tears is more effective than bawling, Rendez-Vous goes straight for the jugular. For all that the experience, which involves lying in a coffin, is one of extremity, the balance is upset by a text that tends towards over-directness.

After going through a small waiting-room/decompression chamber experience that involves leaves a thumbprint and shoes behind, you step into your own lying in repose. An empty room dotted with lilies in the centre of which sits a coffin, your coffin. At least, it’s temporarily yours.

That, in itself, is almost enough. Lying there, oddly comfortable and yet slightly disconcerted, you can’t help but reflect on life as you’ve lived it. What follows – a poetic interrogation that requires no spoken answers – seemed like overkill. To beg such questions as the quantity and quality of tears that might be shed, whether or not you’ve given more than taken or left indelible traces behind is to hanker after certain effects too strongly. Yes, it leaves itself open to individual responses – and doubtless others will have been profoundly affected by the inquisition – but it also puts itself at risk to a certain cynicism.

In its delivery, there is a nice ambiguity to the text, which leaves just enough space between questions to hover been enquiry and rhetoric. Often, just at the point where you feel the need to fill the silence with an answer, the text fires in another question. Other questions jangle around your head without needing to be verbalised. At the same time, there’s an irregular awareness of giving yourself away with a twitch here and a reflex reaction there. Your reflection feels etched all over your face.

Personally, I found the whole experience too naive to cut through my reflexions about life. Rather it became, for me at least, about my relationship to death, particularly an inclination to fetishize my funeral. What does it mean, I kept thinking, that I endure insomniac nights by eulogising myself, picturing facebook tributes and funereal crowds of familiar faces? To be confronted with a genuine echo does something to carve up the self-aggrandisement of those thoughts. Indeed, there’s something deeply warped and jarring about a Polaroid of your own corpse.

For the most part, however, Rendez-Vous is content to leave you wallowing in your own over-embellished perception of yourself, whether for better or worse, richer or poorer, in pity or in pride. It’s not about you, but your idea of you and that is, I suspect, either too comfortable or too uncomfortable, but never a blend of the two.

Response: A Little Bit of Something Beautfiul, One on One Festival at BAC

Barnaby Stone proves that you don’t need to prod, poke and stroke to physically engage an audience member in this exquisitely crafted little piece. For the most part, there was a distance of three or four metres between us – me sat at the top of the stairs, him stood at their foot – and yet, my body underwent a full-blown massage by proxy.

Running down the middle of the stairs like a banister is a beam of oak set on a pedestal like an artefact in a museum. First glances tell you that it’s just wood, but when Stone starts to talk about it, drawing you into its details like a zoom lens, it almost starts to breathe. You register this scent: a musty, organic air-freshener. You notice its grooves and textures, the patches of damp and rot where it seems a collection of dusty particles hanging on together. It becomes nature placed on show, perfectly imperfect and precious.

That delicacy only increases when Stone turns his (and your) attention to its history. Four hundred years as a beam in a house, three hundred aboard a ship and a couple more rooted into the earth, growing and maturing. It is, he explains, nine hundred years old. Give or take.

So, when he casually pops on some safety goggles and fires an electric sander into life, there’s an urge to stop him. You’ve become so fascinated by, so in awe of, even so connected to this object that its wilful destruction seems unstomachable. As the whir grinds into the unseen base of the beam, you feel the vibrations running through your lower back. Fingernails at the rough base of a coffee cup. You squirm in your seat, the buzz starting tiny ripples of spasm in certain muscles. When he starts to smooth manually – first roughly, then more gently – it becomes more bearable; intriguingly meticulous and caring. When he hammers away, to what end you’re not sure, the individual blows strike softly over the distance, before he varnishes lovingly.

And then, inevitably, the bandsaw moves in as it always threatened to do. It’s both harsh and heartening, like a carver moving through a Sunday roast.

Pulling you down by stairlift, what Stones hands you is a slice of time. It is a cross section of the years marked by rings in the wood and of the piece itself, as circles of various size, testifying to recent audience members, form a solar system on its surface. Your own peg is imprinted with an initial and the segment is numbered. As an object, it feels both a sentimental treasure and worthless trinket. Beautiful, yes, but also neutral.

The beauty of Stone’s piece, however, lies in its multitude of connotations. Nature, craft, time, produce are all raised and, though Stone refuses to theorize or provide answers, you come out with a wealth of ethical questions about our relationship to the world around us. That, and an envelope containing something quietly extraordinary.

Photograph by Stephen Dobbie

Response: Wonder Nurse, One on One Festival at BAC

What strikes me most about Wonder Nurse is that it is, in a surprisingly traditional manner, a comedy. Even though we are involved in a situation, asked to participate and make up the gaps, there is a sense in which one is laughing the wit of a script as written and delivered.

Walk into a room and you’ll be beckoned behind a curtain by a woman dressed – slightly cartoonishly – as a nurse. That ushering is not seductive and it’s not authoritarian, but businesslike; it’s just that it’s your turn – nothing more, nothing less. Introductions over, one is asked to put on a patient’s gown over your clothes (the sort used to comic effect in films because it leaves your bum exposed). Here, the effect is mildly unsettling: it suggests that all is not so well. Seated opposite Wonder Nurse, a wacky screwball of a character, you are questioned in that familiar manner (again) of a routine check-up. There’s no sense of interrogation. Rather it’s a checked list, reeled off at pace, cycled through.

Because, ultimately, it dawns on you that this is not really about your answers. Unlike many of these pieces, Wonder Nurse has no therapeutic qualities. It doesn’t take itself seriously or place itself wholly in the real world. Instead, it plays out the therapeutic situation with a droll twist; the questions, it becomes apparent, belong to the world of fairytale. They ask about your mother and father, about your mirror, about your relationship to talking woodland creatures. There is a lovely description in the programme notes: “Clinically unproven and medically useless.” All is done in jest, with a likeable grin and a refusal – for all that you might try – to actually resonate with your real life. That’s rather refreshing.

On a more serious level, Emma Rice – who has directed the piece with more than a lacing of Kneehigh’s childish spirit – is concerned with the healing power of stories. After all, this is what we are prescribed and – eyes closed, semi-relaxed – we are given a fairytale to swallow. And its delivered with real savour by Edith Tankus.

Wonder Nurse won’t change your life or restore you to well-being. It is, however, a theatrical nugget that will raise a smile and while away a few minutes. Cute, kooky and charmingly round the twist.

Review: One on One Festival, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Time Out

Short of shelling out a fortune to spend a fortnight exploring every nook and cranny of the Battersea Arts Centre, there's no way to get a complete, or even a wholly satisfying, experience of the One-on-One Festival. Nonetheless, it is a necessary and exiting laboratory and the results, though not unanimous, are hugely positive.

Here, 'audience' is not a collective term, but a personal pronoun. Every piece is designed to provide an individual, bespoke experience. You might find yourself lying in a coffin or jutting out of a first floor window. You could be interrogated, serenaded, masqueraded or exfoliated. Revealing any more would ruin the pleasure of jumpy anticipation that makes a butterfly house of your stomach.

It would also be to overbrief, as the pieces are best experienced blind (often quite literally). All that needs pointing out is their shared intensity, which makes even the more banal and inconsequential pieces seem like gifts. Even those that think the Emperor naked will have to admit that he's never looked sharper.

On arrival, each attendee receives a personalised timeline outlining their allocated appointments for the evening. Most are set down for three or four of the thirty-six pieces that make up the festival. That leaves a lot of potential longueurs, spun as “time to explore, refresh and reflect,” and a nagging sense of missing out on the greenest grass.

In a smorgasbord of this sort, there is inevitably a broad spectrum of quality. Of the canapés on offer, some are calorific delights, others are merely titillating titbits. But that's the nature of the beast and to criticize a collection containing some of the most extraordinary, hard-hitting and thought-provoking theatrics in London would be to undermine a vital event on account of insurmountable obstacles. One or two are potentially life-changing and, taken as a whole, it's game-changing.

Response: Just For A Moment, One on One Festival at BAC

Three Blind Mice are a company born out of the Battersea Arts Centre’s YPT (Young Persons’ Theatre) scheme. Just For a Moment, therefore, ought not to be judged alongside the work of professional practitioners. As such, the following may seem unnecessarily harsh, but, in keeping with the exploratory nature of the festival, it is an interesting point of reference when trying to understand the mechanisms behind a format. Please read accordingly.

The physical manifestation of a daydream, Just For A Moment suffers from its clarity. When we’re stripped of sight, the world should be disorientating and unfamiliar. Three Blind Mice, however, reduce it to little more than a series of signs to be decoded. The formula is too legible: sand underfoot + canvas chair + heat + seagulls cawing + the smell of suntan lotion + pina colada = beach. The situations that one drifts into are too everyday and stock: pubs, clubs, crowds and chambers of hands.

Just For A Moment pitches you at a bar and leaves you waiting. A phone goes and – once you finally realise that you might need to pick it up (my hands had to be led towards it, having assumed it part of the soundscape) – a male voice apologises for the delay and explains that he’s en route. From there one drifts in and out of the bar, whisked away by soft, guiding fingers. Most of these moments, however, is established in order to come to nothing. You sit or dance or jostle or wonder quite how old the hands running over your body are before being returned to your bar stool and waiting flat pint.

The curious thing is that, for all the banality behind the piece’s thought-process, it still felt like a personalised gift. Despite finding it uninspiring and unoriginal, I still enjoyed the moment by moment experience. To judge from the comments left by previous audience members, most people do. That, surely, must be marked down as the format’s success. The question is why?

I suspect that it has to do with trepidation. Narratives are best when we become wrapped up in their unfolding. They succeed by engaging us in a story to the extent that we want – no, need – to know what comes next. Where we become the subject of our own narrative, the centre of our own story, that comes as standard. Narratives told or portrayed must make us care about others. Here, we cannot but care. It matters because it’s happening to us. The anxiety of not knowing what’s in store for us (here, emphasised by being blindfolded) ensures that we remain engaged and on guard.

That, I think, is what makes one on one work such an exciting format, but it also leaves it susceptible to accusations of empty titillation. Just For A Moment cheats us because it leaves very little in its wake. It is an experience without reverberations, exciting and pleasant but ultimately toothless. Experiential theatre cannot afford to rest on its laurels. No artform can. It must guard against providing experiences for the sake of it, because when artists can give us any experience, any old experience is not enough.

Response: Electric, One on One Festival at BAC

Professor Ray Lee has the air of a GP carrying out some form of check up. He peers over his rectangular glasses and looks directly, deeply into your eyes. He reacts to responses with noncommittal hums or, more disconcertingly, a slight tilt of the head that suggests intrigued, even wrongfooted, puzzlement. Most of all his questions and his requests spring come from nowhere: “OK, hmm. Have you ever had an electric shock? Hold this, please.”

If the relationship feels familiar – and that’s not to say entirely comfortable – it’s also slightly warped. After all, Ray Lee is tucked away round the back of the building. The stairway to his squalid office, which feels more like an academic’s lair, is lined with peeling paint. There’s a sense of disreputability, as if perhaps his “ethometric research” has not been entirely condoned. Your eardrums vibrate with a constant hollow metallic buzz. Certainly, the room is charged, quite literally, due to various machines that clutter the shelves, murmuring, droning and whirring.

Electric fits into that category of art which opens your eyes to something commonplace taken for granted. Asked to define electricity and describe its workings, I’m pretty stumped. Something about the flow of electrons returns from a shady memory of a strip-light in a Physics classroom being used as an analogy. There’s a sensation of a first (and last) shock – in both senses – aged no more than four.

And then, you’re connected. Ray Lee touches your hand, completing a circuit, and a tingle paces over your fingers. It defies description, but remains absolutely recognisable as the sensation of electricity. I was reminded of the taste of a battery on the tongue, not a flavour but a feeling. Rather magically, there’s also a realisation that something – electrons, presumably – is travelling between your body and his. There’s a genuine exchange. Its smile inducing and eye-widening.

Yet Lee also allows you a sensation of danger. Placing both electrodes – oddly cold – in your hands, he invites you to increase the force of the charge by tightening your grip. It’s an unnerving, unsettling and thrilling effect. Was I projecting that my heart tensed? Certainly a vein in my wrist flickered into spasm. Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.

There’s little more to the experience than that, but it takes a while to shake off. Walking away with a tingle still caught on your skin and a bemused smile, it’s the sort of experience that feels like a small privilege. An opportunity given. Another of life’s little experiences ticked off the list.

Response: Observation Deck, One on One Festival at BAC

Observation Deck is not so much ‘one on one’ as ‘on one’s own’. In a back room of the BAC, there is a contraption conceived and designed by Patrick Killoran. Essentially, it's a viewing platform with steps leading up to a wooden plane. One is instructed to lie down, lining your head up with the cut out square at the end, and, when ready, to ease yourself out of the window.

Thus protruding the first thing you’ll experience is trepidation, particularly if – like me – heights aren’t your forte. Your wooden perch feels awful flimsy and there’s certainly no safety net below. Nor are there handles to grip white-knuckled, straps to take the strain or barriers to provide peace of mind. This is raw and it’s real.

Gradually, breath by breath, that subsides into the sublime: a new perspective on a familiar sky, dotted with stars or fluffed with clouds. Looking up at the building at your waist is like staring at a painting in perspective. The object becomes unfamiliar to the point of distortion. Arch your neck backwards and you’ll see the city upside-down, stretching off the (in my case, sunset-streaked) horizon.

As a ten minute window of time, it’s yours to do with as you wish. I found it incredibly peaceful and cleansing, a chance to absorb and exhale, but I can see how some might tick the experience off and move on.

Lying there with the window frame over my chest, two things occurred. First, I would have liked to have been pushed out rather than propelling myself. Second that, once I felt safe, I would have liked to go further towards the tipping point of imbalance. I suspect both relate to the BAC’s chosen (and, in my opinion misconstrued marketing-speak) tagline: Face Your Fears.

When we experience (in a framed setting), as opposed to spectating (on or through the frame), there comes a desire for that experience to go further. Just as we scream ‘faster’ from a fairground ride, we want to be pushed to our limits and test ourselves against them. In an individual setting, where the experience in the moment is mine and mine alone, we want to set the boundaries for ourselves. When the other audience members are absent and forgotten, the one-size-fits-all mould seems a needless and problematic constraint.

And yet, where the artist takes us too far and oversteps the mark, we are quick to lay blame at their feet. (Think of certain responses to Internal. Note to self: must stop using Internal as go to example.) The trouble is that this edge of tolerance (or discomfort or otherwise) is necessarily a fine, fine line. Even on its cusp, we believe that we could go further. We always want to believe the Buckaroo will hold one more item. We like that gamble, but we don’t like its backfiring.

This, it strikes me, is the challenge faced by artists working with one on one theatre and interactivity, even with the experiential at large. Play it safe and the result is blandness and feeling shortchanged. Misjudge the balance in the slightest way, take us too far, and you lose us entirely. It is terribly delicate balancing act that needs approaching with a great deal of care.

Response: Folk in a Box, One on One Festival at BAC

Perhaps more than any other piece at the festival, Folk in a Box is a performance in the traditional sense. It involves watching a performance, albeit one that takes place in private. In a festival when one is braced for all manner of present participles, that makes it quite an interesting proposition.

In a corner of the courtyard is a box, probably better described as a crate. It has the look of a travelling sideshow: the words Folk in a Box are painted in a stamp-like font, the sort that labels American military crates. On its front is a little white door, peeling slightly, presumably with travel. Stepping through, craned over like an oversized Alice, the space reveals itself to be dark bar the orange flicker of a cheap, sort of sci-fi lightbulb, which casts a glowing streak across a performer’s face and instrument (a guitar – it’s not that sort of show). Pleasantries exchanged, he (or she) plays a folk song, selected seemingly from a small library of tunes in mind.

It’s a gentle, soothing experience – a dainty, jovial song played in darkness – but, at the same time, it’s little more than that. If one was seeking something noteworthy to draw out, Folk in a Box manages (only half-wittingly) the oddity of functioning as audience in a one on one encounter. In this situation, face to face with a performer, audience response becomes a performance in itself. Admittedly, the same is true in larger crowds: consider the exaggerated laughter that testifies to getting a joke and finding ‘this sort of thing’ funny. However, one on one the motivation changes. It becomes about not causing offence to the performer.

Personally, I found Folk in the Box uninspiring. In the near-darkness, as the performer concentrates on the guitar, there’s a relief from the pressure of having to perform appreciation. Come the end, the silence demanded filling and so I let slip a couple of claps, but that felt absurd. Instead I proffered a ‘thank you’, only the sort that one is nudged into as a child, perhaps on leaving a friend’s house or on receiving a bland birthday present. A 'what-do-you-say?' thank you.

That leads into this curious feeling of being gifted something in this configuration. It’s remarkable how quickly we extrapolate the private to the personal. And even more interesting that, on account of that leap, we feel obligations based on everyday etiquette. The result is insincere gratitude born of a platitude. I left, smiling at the assistant outside the box, still maintaining the deference, forcing a nod and a smile, faking it until out of sight.

Review: The Smile Off Your Face, One on One Festival at BAC

Another day, another wheelchair rickshaw ride...

Ontroerend Goed’s The Smile Off Your Face seems the most appropriate place to start my journey through the BAC’s One on One Festival, a fortnight of performances to and encounters for individuals. Here ‘audience’ is not a collective term, but a personal pronoun. Without wanting to disrespect those artists that have been (intentionally) playing to lone audience members for years, I’d argue that this festival has its roots in another one: the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe. At the (then) new venue, C Soco, two shows forced us to ask that age-old question of aesthetics: “But is it theatre?” One was Six Women Standing in Front of a White Wall, which did exactly what it said on the tin in a manner that achieved so much more. The other was The Smile Off Your Face.

The coincidental combination, which received a great deal of inquisitive media coverage, gained enough of a profile to prick the interests of artists and audiences alike. Both played with theatrical form – very successfully – and opened up a whole range of previously untapped possibilities. More importantly (arguably), both seemed to achieve economic viability, perhaps even success, in an overcrowded, over-competitive marketplace by employing an alternative format for a production run. This was novel; a curiosity that excited us and that whet our appetites for a new kind of audience-performer relationship.

Having both read about The Smile Off Your Face and heard its director Alexander Devriant talk about the piece, I could only approach it as a museum piece. Its crux, much like Internal, is a swift, clinical 360° turn on its heels that changes everything. To know the twist, you’d think, would be to break the show. And yet, remarkably, it didn’t. My experience – though perhaps muted by prior knowledge – was far more intense than anticipated. That, surely, is credit to the craftsmanship behind it.

Sat in a wheelchair, participants are blindfolded and restrained with hand ties, before being pushed into a room. No amount of forewarning can fully prepare you for the level of vulnerability experienced. Thus pacified, one becomes totally dependent on the guidance of others.

What follows is a series of sensual moments. In amongst the sounds of the open air (the chirps and chatter of birds and crickets), more human sounds emerge, all only semi-identifiable. Here a watch ticking, there the flicker of pages in a book, then the whir of a Polaroid camera. Something tickles the tips of your hair, a seemingly disembodied nose presses up against yours, the scent of perfume (or is it aftershave?) catches your attention. Your hands are led to a face, which is unexpectedly – joltingly, even – bearded. At times, one is ushered gently out of the chair for a moment of contact with another entirely anonymous body. Words are whispered, questions are asked.

Its ingenuity is to toy with your submission, lulling you into security – the same tingle of a head-massage before a haircut, sometimes more charged with a hint of the erotic – before abandoning you momentarily. With one hand it feeds, with the other its forces; it treats and it withholds; it never oversteps the mark (too far).

What’s interesting is that, like Internal, there’s a direct echo of prostitution within. At one point, you’re thrown backwards onto a bed, where you lie entwined with an unseen performer, her weight (perhaps his for women) resting on your chest and leg draped over yours. It’s an echo so familiar that the emotions follow – comfort, arousal, calm – as if the body takes a shape, the senses get a clue or two and the mind syncs up accordingly. It made me realise that the booths of Internal contain not only the false privacy of a speed date, but also of something seedier: the strip club. By extension, one realises that we too have paid for this experience. I couldn’t but think of Nicholas Ridout’s discussion of the transaction at the heart of theatre (and art more generally) in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems:

“One can easily indulge in the fantasy that the poet, the painter or the composer, whose work is accomplished in your absence, might simply create art for its own sake. It is much harder to keep this delusion intact in the presence of workers who are doing their work in your presence. The prostitute who is both seller and commodity is emblematic of modern capitalism for Benjamin, because she makes visible the nature of the underlying terms. The moment you recognise the actor in similar terms, a certain awkwardness or embarrassment comes into the relationship. Of course, such embarrassment only really surfaces at moments of crisis, at which the reality of the economic relation is somehow precipitated into view.”

Does, I wonder, the entire movement of one on one theatre count as such a crisis? Does it rely on the awkward embarrassment of worker and consumer? Who’s in control? Who panders to whose needs and desires? Why do we often feel grateful? Why does it often feel like a gift?

As for that revelation, well, I shan’t spoil it (look elsewhere if you must), but it’s summed up in a single teardrop. Towards the end, your blindfold is whipped off and you find yourself face to face with a performer, sat in front of a wall covered in Polaroids. He points yours out, there’s a slightly startled, totally unguarded look on your masked face. You realise he has a beard. He asks you to smile, you do so. It feels like an age. Your cheeks relax, your smile subsides. When he asks for the smile again (and again), you force it. Over a minute, never losing focus on your straining, smiling eyes, he pushes out a single teardrop. It means the world, but it’s totally manipulated.

As you’re wheeled away, backwards out of the space, the realisation lands. You know that you’ve been had as much as it knows it’s had you. And The Smile Off Your Face ends with a wink, saying as much.

Review: Not By Bread Alone, Arts Depot

Written for Culture Wars

Sometimes the simple fact of a show’s occurrence is all it takes. Consider the work of the Free Theatre of Belarus, a company that must defy political censorship and runs the risk of prosecution with every production. In the same way, the mere existence of Not By Bread Alone, which is performed by a cast of eleven deafblind actors, is astonishing in and of itself. It counts not as acting, but as an act: hard-earnt, brave, determined, defiant.

Loosely put, in terms of content, the actors make bread – from the kneading to the sharing – and, while it bakes they share their stories and dreams, reminding us that no-one can live by bread alone. Life, no matter one’s circumstances, is more than mere survival. The double-edge, although it is a piece grounded in generosity, is a soft reprimand for any preconceptions about their capabilities and attitudes to life.

At times the actors are led into position by sighted stage-hands, who double as translators of sign language. Sometimes they cut free, bounding across the stage in a manner that strikes you as almost reckless, or else they count their steps privately or form people-chains to navigate their way together, totally trusting. Cues come in the form of unostentatious taps on shoulders or the vibrations of a drum. To us, reliant on sight and sound, it seems unthinkable, but watching these men and women not just cope, but make a show of it, you swell with admiration.

More than that, though, the show wears its process openly. At some point, as you watch them pass messages like Chinese whispers passed hand to hand – sign language functioning like moving Braille – you think of the difficulties in creating the piece in the first place. Any collaborative process of creation is dependent on communication and, in their case, that becomes an entirely different proposition. Not By Bread Alone, you come to realise, represents two years of exhaustive teamwork and that’s inspirational.

Of course, the company (and their achievement) comes with political connotations on the basis of its location. The Nalaga’at Centre (Hebrew for ‘do touch) is based in Israel and the company – its more than the eleven-strong acting ensemble – includes Jews, Muslims and Christians. It’s undeniably hopeful in spirit.

Watching it, of course, you become aware of the individual’s behind the disability, their mannerism and kooks, as well as their hopes and fears. But the most curious element is the effect of their disability in terms of performance. What, I kept thinking, does it mean for us to be watching people who have to be told of our presence, not to mention our response? What does it mean to watch someone who can’t watch you back or have any sense of you as an individual? What does it mean to clap appreciatively, to participate or, alternatively, not to do so?

I shan’t gush over the actual content of the performance itself, though it does feel easy to let that impulse run away with you. There was a certain simplicity of thought and broadness of poetry that prevented me from getting lost in it. However, that hardly matters. I looked on with the greatest of respect, perhaps even slightly proud of our species. That matters. This matters.

Review: Assassins, Union Theatre

Written for Time Out

Stephen Sondheim's firebrand musical might lose the irony behind its Broadway tipsiness when scaled down but, in Michael Strassen's distilled staging, it gains all the potency of moonshine. The collective of would-be President killers stands steadfast before us like a picket line. We don't just see the imagery of insurgency, we bear its brunt. To hear them blasting Another National Anthem is like finding an anti-war rally in your living room.

In the main, Strassen disregards historical likeness, preferring instead to savour the flavour of Sondheim's caricatures. The result is a cracking ensemble, miscellaneous as a toybox, and a string of playful individual performances, from John Barr's waddling fruitcake of a Guiteau to Leigh McDonald's squawking Sara Jane Moore.

There is a tendency for more flippant characters to overwhelm those with real political motivations. But this doesn't detract from performances like that of Nick Holder - best of all - as a raspy Samuel Byck, who plotted to fly a 747 into Nixon's White House. Plump as a Thanksgiving turkey and greasy as a McNugget, his perfectly-paced tape-recorded rant to Lenny Bernstein conveys a furious cynicism born of long-term, deep-seated injustice.

More could be made of the CIA chorus, but on a purgatorial brick-walled bare stage this Assassins scars like an exit-wound.

Review: You, Me, Bum Bum Train, LEB Building

Written for Culture Wars

You never forget your first time. Almost two years ago, in the heart of Shoreditch, I stepped through the glitzy curtains of a pop-up karaoke bar to ride the Bum Bum Train with no idea as to what awaited me. Plonked in a rickety wheelchair, I was sped through a maze of interactive social situations – from catwalk to bobsleigh run – at breakneck speed. I signed an autograph for a sick child as Daniel Craig. I threw a punch. I passed off ungo-bungo noises as Swahili. The whole effect was a dizzying tailspin, (re)acting solely on impulse. I remember it taking half an hour to reacclimatize to the steady pace of normality. I stand by everything I wrote at the time.

It won’t surprise you that I had braced myself somewhat second time around, primed and ready for anything. That in itself is problematic: You Me Bum Bum Train relies on the disorientation of trying to identify a situation even as you respond to it. As with Punchdrunk’s work, once you know how the game works there’s a danger of breaking it. If anything that’s more acute in this case, given that YMBBT’s form is so dominant over its content.

That’s not to dismiss this year’s chosen scenarios – though, of course, to reveal anything would be unfair. Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond have cherry-picked some corkers: so full of invention that anticipation would be impossible even if you dreamt up a wish-list beforehand. I chuckled my way through a great deal of the forty minute experience; half disbelieving their ballsiness, half-delighted by their wit.

Sadly, however, that’s just not enough for me. That’s a brilliant fairground ride, not brilliant interactive theatre. If I’m honest, I really missed the bite. YMBBT is best when we’re not acting, but reacting. In this version too many scenarios indulge us, pandering to our egos by casting us in leading roles without having to cope with the stresses of an audience. If we're acting, whatever the role, whether cop or robber, the challenge is the same: you (as person) have to improv through that situation (as character). It becomes about quick-thinking, perhaps rewarding the sort of egotistical gag-based improv that can be so damaging in a genuine process. Ultimately what you say in response doesn't really matter unless it comes from you. I responded to one question with what must have seemed a surreal list of the Beatles simply because they sprung to mind. These scenarios, however, can demand a real response that requires subsequent reflection. They needn't all do so - there remains room for play - but something needs to scar.

Much of this is due to growth, in length as well as size, which lessens the impact of the overall, even though it allows fleshier individual scenes. The slower pace, with more time in transition and longer immersions, allows you to settle and catch your breath. And it can’t afford to. The moment we engage our brains, we start to play along. YMBBT needs to charge at us and leave us breathless in order to draw the unexpected out of us. Here, I felt more driver than startled rabbit.

Perhaps all this neglects the sheer head-rush of YMBBT; the fact that your heart beats double-speed and your adrenaline glands work like never before. Or maybe I’ve distilled a previous experience into a distorted memory that can’t be matched. Perhaps I was simply over-prepared.

Regardess, it’s still the most fun you can have in London theatre. I just wish it put up more of a fight.

Review: Best Before, ICA

Written for Culture Wars

There are so many sides to Rimini Protokoll’s live-videogame that it inevitably raises a great number of thoughts. At different levels it speaks, simultaneously, of life, game-playing, political rule and much more besides. While that’s impressive – and, certainly, I went through a rigorously reflexive process in its wake – I can’t help thinking that it would benefit from picking its battles a bit. Smaller aims and a tighter focus would overcome its privileging of breadth over depth.

The 120 of us in the ICA auditorium are about to become citizens of Bestland, a plain box of a land that appears of the screen at the back of the stage. Row by row, our avatars drop from the sky and, for the next two hours, we take charge of our globular citizen, guiding them through a series of choices from cradle to grave. As we play alongside one another – probably not with one another – it forms a microcosm of a (mostly) democratic society.

Essentially, it’s little more than a multiple choice questionnaire. It allows you to select a route through a life in real time. Do you, aged 15, hop into bed with another avatar or remain chaste? Do you chose university and the accompanying debts or launch into a career? Elsewhere, particularly early on, the choices are broader. What sort of person do you want to be? Smart or stupid? Lazy or slothful? What are your values? Each choice, of course, comes with consequences. Irv, my avatar, ended up something of an unemployed bum, more or less on the basis of an uncharacteristic experiment with heroin (I had previously abstained from both alcohol and cannabis). A stint in jail followed, then came abject poverty and, by the time I found myself running for election, outright rejection. Everyone has their own individual frustrations and regrets.

So, sure, it goes some way to demonstrating the accountability each of us has day by day. Perhaps it even makes us better people, turning our gaze on ourselves and the choices that led to this point or, more importantly, the choices we make from this point. The wonder is that one needs reminding at all. Ultimately, Best Before involves spending two hours in a toy world making choices with consequences within that framework, when you could just as well spend that time making real choices with real consequences. Sure it’s diverting, but how much does it all matter?

But then there’s the other level: Best Before as game. Surely it contains (and ponders) its own self-defeating futility, no? It asks us why we spent time in this way and what that particular life-choice entails. Moreover it begs the difference between life’s choices and those made in the context of a game, where playfulness leads and the need for consistency flies out of the window. Add in this feeling of being curtailed and controlled by those running the game and you get a whole manner of questions about the ways in which we’re manipulated, both by the gaming industry (at one point we’re told that a recent Need for Speed game included scenographical advertising that was part of the official Obama election campaign) and, in real life, those that rule the country.

As with all constructed microcosmic systems, however, it cannot but fall short of reality. The computer programme can never become more than a reflection of the intelligence that created it. That gives Best Before, which attempts little more than replication, a certain banality. It seems simplified and flattened. When you start comparing it to actual computer games, the structure begins to look Neanderthal. Perhaps that’s unfair, given that onstage the game becomes framed as an object of enquiry, but there is a nagging naivety at play.

Interspersed neatly throughout the game are monologues in which the controller-performers talk about their life-choices. One gave up a job in journalism to flag traffic, another left politics for gaming. Yet, thought the company can only work with what they’ve got, these feel arbitrary and unnecessary, as if tacked on to draw out a point already inherent.

I’ll admit that Best Before raised questions. In fact, it raised an extraordinary number and range of questions, both reflexive and reflective. But if I’m being honest, I can’t say that it sparked anything new or tackled any issue with real penetration. It is what it is: quietly interesting and an enjoyable diversion, but it’s also too banal and too fuzzy to really make a difference.

Review: Life Streaming, National Theatre Square

Written for Culture Wars

Parked on the South Bank there’s a portal to Sri Lanka: Dries Verhoeven has set up a temporary internet cafe to link sixteen Londoners with sixteen Sri Lankans (and vice versa) over a distance of 8,805 kilometres for around an hour at a time. To enter is to join a cultural exchange programme for an isolated, peaceful, reflective hour that draws the liminal out of the virtual.

Sat barefoot at a computer terminal, headphones over ears, under the steady gaze of a webcam, we’re paired up – perhaps randomly, perhaps delicately – and connected to a performer in an internet cafe beachside in Sri Lanka. On the screen, words appear: some pre-typed and poetic as if coming from an impersonalised narrator; others emerge in the moment, stuttering in half-broken but readily-comprehensible English. I am, I soon discover, talking to/typing with Hansika, a twenty-year old woman, soon to train as a teacher, who was – like all our counterparts – caught up in the tsunami that wracked the region’s shorelines in 2004.

Under the guise of this online conversation – sometimes through text, sometimes through sound and image - Life Streaming becomes a gentle interrogation of cross-cultural assumptions. At times it adopts the ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ line of thought, where elsewhere it reveals a way of life so alien that it’s almost unrecognisable. Neither Hansika nor I, for example, have insurance, though for me it’s unthinking, for her, unthinkable. We have an interesting, almost-genuine encounter, which in the main she leads inquisitively and I follow. Where I ask questions or where my answers don’t fit neatly into the scheme, Hansika follows and adapts. It feels, as interactive work goes, unusually dialogical – in part, I suspect, because it admits so readily of its own particular status as performance structure. Verhoeven has been careful with his structuring, providing a prologue, an epilogue and several interludes. The result is a stage managed conversation that never becomes stymied.

Where Life Streaming really comes into itself is in its investigation of its own format. What does it mean, Verhoeven probes, for us (Hansika & I as well as the human collective) to communicate in this way? He begs the effect of distance and the distorting effect of mediatisation, ensuring an awareness of the incompleteness of one’s knowledge of the other person and the manipulation that can occur accordingly. There’s also a knife-twisting attack on our own assumptions, born of images and ideas that stand in for reality and experience. At times we are gently manipulated into a state of patronising commiseration, before being scolded for exactly that. “I don’t want your pity,” Hansika writes before I’ve even had a chance to express it to her, “We’ve only just met.” It’s a sharp slap delivered as a temperate reprimand.

In her review for The Guardian, Lyn Gardner rightly begs the question as to what distinguishes Life Streaming for any other online conversation. She might as well be asking whether a similar experience could be had courtesy of the random switchboarding of chatroulette. In some ways, she has a point. But then, so does Verhoeven. In fact, he has many, possibly including that question itself. His kind-hearted manipulation combined with the particular choice of virtual portal achieve – ie to Sri Lanka rather than elsewhere; his framing of the online exchange as experiential and his extension of that experience by pumping in smells that conjure an Eastern elsewhere, creating the orange glow, flickering with the rotations of a ceiling fan, reminiscent of the internet cafes Leonardo di Caprio finds in The Beach, the slow rising in temperature and humidity and finally, the gentle lap of hot water at your feet; all this combines to strengthen the sense of connection and shared experience, even if only as an idea rather than as actually achieved. It is moving, warm-hearted and softly uplifting.

Furthermore, Mark Ball deserves praise for its (undoubtedly costly) programming, since it sits as a necessary companion and counterpoint to Continuous City. Seeing it a mere twelve hours afterwards was to be reminded of the wonder within this inferno of our own making. Perhaps, just perhaps, online communication can be worthy after all. But then it’s what we do with technology that counts, right?