Written for Culture Wars
Rimini Protokoll, the Jeremy Vine of the international theatre circuit, have reduced London’s population to fit on the Hackney Empire’s stage. One hundred Londoners, selected (in theory, at least) to mirror the city’s diversity with proportional accuracy, are there to answer question upon question, thus building up a staged portrait of the capital. They are, we’re told, “a body with a hundred heads, a chorus that cannot speak in sync, a choir that cannot sing as one.”
Undoubtedly, the format has two things going for it. The first is spectacle; place lots of the same thing on a stage and you instantly gratify an audience, but here the joy is simply in people watching. They start with introductions. Seventy-something Walter Gutzmore walks out alone to reminisce about the Empire’s bingo hall past. The 99 that follow are all shapes and sizes, colours and creeds and classes. They line up in age order; they split into genders. They start miming their day’s activities - 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock? – so that the youngest bed down and the young adults rave on until the youngsters wake early and drag their parents out of bed.
Inevitably, characters emerge; those that like the limelight, that ensure they’re visible when giving answers. Others slink into the back, to make up the numbers. You start to chart stories and gain a sense of character. In a way, this is just a massive version of hotseating – a Stanislavskian exercise where an actor is interviewed in character. There is too much information pouring off the stage to take in at once.
The second strength is in the individual moments that have a surprising capacity to affect the audience. As direct questions are asked, participants drift towards stage-right to answer affirmatively, to stage-left for the negative. Seven have been homeless. Three describe themselves as gay. Just over half have shoplifted. There are some pretty probing questions within: about burkhas, about the riots, about real opinions that really matter. And, of course, there are some brilliant moments, whether delicate or poignant or startling. Like the 25 or so with a weapon at home or the three cancer survivors stood together in front of an audience, receiving applause that’s first uncertain, then heartfelt.
These emerge from the presentation in a standard 90 minute (though on the night I saw it, the run-time stretched to more than 2 hours) staging. I wonder whether it might work better as a piece of public durational art. Seemingly aware that an audience will struggle to watch the same thing happening for two hours onstage, Rimini Protokoll shake up the format – turning the lights out for anonymity makes sense, as does opening the event to include us (both as questioners and answering for ourselves), but other modes are just arbitrary alternatives with a different feel. You sense a company trying to liven proceedings up and counter against monotony. Away from a stage or even a standard show length, no such pressure would exist.
However, the main hurdle is that 100% London can never be that which it wants to be. A group of 100 – out of 7.5 million – is simply too small to even claim to represent something wider, thus pulling the rug and reason out from under 100% London’s feet. Acknowledging such problems – and Rimini Protokol are experienced enough to artfully include reflexive evaluation – makes us watch critically and not take its content at face value, but it can’t re-inflate a real sense of purpose. Nor does it go far enough in that evaluation: there is no acknowledgement that some opinions come with added weight, while others are ten a penny. If its ultimate purpose is to show the unreliability of statistics and opinion polls, then it doesn’t stress the issue or break the form.
Essentially, Rimini Protokoll have concocted a piece of documentary theatre with too loose a connecting thread, and as you brace yourself for another longeur, it’s the arbitrariness that really rankles. For all its pithy neatness, 100% London a hollow – and almost futile – gesture.
Photograph: Tim Mitchell
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