It Gets Up My Nose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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