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Monday, August 20, 2012

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Written for Culture Wars
Two park bench grumblers are moaning about the modern world. Today’s streets are so rife with crime, one says, that the only viable option is to stay indoors and risk getting rickets. And as for kids these days – with their too-short shirts and their hair gel, going round mugging and rioting and stabbing – well, the less said the better. “They should just improve!” says the other. “Yeah, our generation should just generally improve.”

‘Our generation’ because these are not the words of bitterly nostalgic old men spat out by life, but of Sid and Zachary, neither of whom has yet celebrated their 12th birthday.

Sid and Zachary are two of the 72 children that Karl James, co-director of Tim Crouch’s The Author, interviewed or recorded in conversation with one another. Their words were then taken by Chris Goode, edited together into a script and placed into the mouths of adult actors. The transformation is enormous. The actors don’t twitch and fidget. They speak in their own voices, clearly, crisp and even, always taking real care with the thought process behind the words.

And yet, those words are squiffy and roundabout, naïve and misplaced and confused and regurgitated. Yet in spite of this, or rather because of this, they are variously poignant, profound and gently terrifying.

Monkey Bars is as densely simple a piece of theatre as you’ll find. You know exactly what you’re watching, and yet, at all times, you watch it in several different ways at once. Sure, on the surface, Goode gets us to listen to what these children have (had) to say afresh, but there’s much, much more to it than that as well.

What might have been dismissed as childish babble is instead played as considered thought, intended rather than spluttered. Eyes seem to search for the right phrase, rather than for whatever word might do or happens to spring to mind. Statements become those of an individual, not just luke warm air from a.n. other pair of childish lungs. We don’t take them entirely seriously – it’s not simply a matter of listen to what children have to say and follow it. Instead, we consider where these statements come from and what, really, they say about the world.

In some instances, it’s just the childish mind in all its scatty, freewheeling, gobbledegookish beauty. Some of the conversations are played as stock situations, so that childish chatter stands in for first date small-talk or coffee-break musing. A job interview starts with favourite sweets and builds, in a bid to sort wheat from chaf, to killer questions: “If you were like, like, a like bubble-gum creature, what would you do.” This is tremendously, unfailingly and adorably funny; the sort of thing an E4 comedy commissioner might storm in and programme immediately, trading on its Creature Comforts style of cuddle-ified reality.

However, doing so would be to shy away from Monkey Bars’ real heart, which is the very particular – and rigorously critiqued – window on the world it offers. Essentially, Goode gets us to see children as both subjects and objects; as views on the world and, crucially, in the world; as products of it.

So, for example, when two men play Muslim boys discussing the concept of haram or when two woman playing girls musing on British pride (“We’ve helped so many people in like countries in war”), you glimpse the process of active indoctrination. As such, you look into yourself and see that, somewhere deep down, absolutely entrenched, the same feeling exists, uninterrogated or swallowed whole.

Or, for example, when the subject of aspirations crops up as children discuss fame or the (material) trappings of success, you start to see the world we’ve made and the values that society – unconsciously – passes on to the next generation.

Or, for example, the way you see adults' talk reflected back, picked up and mangled by the child speaker. They natter about paparazzi and money and the fact that “our taxes go to the Olympics.” Sometimes, they just tell it straight: that, to them, adult voices sound permanently angry.

Monkey Bars is not a neat show. It’s many different things at once and, what’s more, has the curious property of being as satisfying at ninety minutes as it would at either sixty seconds or two weeks solid. Honestly, I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. That’s because it’s neither; it’s just a thing, because so is Monkey Bars itself.

What James and Goode have discovered and present is not simply 90 minutes worth of content, it’s not really a show per se. Instead it’s a mode of looking at and talking about the world that is inherently enjoyable and instructive. Monkey Bars is inevitably a tincey bit unsatisfying because that mode is so consistently satisfying; you want it to cover everything and, in 90 minutes, it clearly can’t. A neater show might have confined itself to a single topic presented in the same manner. A neater show would be worse.

I could go on – about the way that one child’s brain seems to overload as he fizzes of the topic of war and onto that of leg cramps, about the way that a performance poem about cake shows the way that children assess the definites, about the importance of singing to jelly, about the way conversations are really ways of making sense of the self, about the scorched trauma of witnessing a car accident, about the eloquence of addiction being the worst thing about adulthood, about the beauty in the care of the actors and the stage as a space of ideas – but I also can’t, because my brain has been frazzled by the Fringe and my backlog has been mounting while I struggled to untangle Monkey Bars' complexities. It is so much in so little. And ultimately, is anything as important as the world we pass on to our children?

Monkey Bars is on at the Unicorn Theatre 25th - 30th September.

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