This was written for
Criticism & Love, a TinyLetter I've been writing for the past six
months with Andy Field, and I wouldn't normally cross-post it, except
that I've been thinking recently that it's time to stop using this
blog and build a different web home, one that more accurately
reflects where I am in life now, rather than where I was in April
2011. I have one more thing to publish here which might take me a
month or so to put together, and then if I can sort my shit out I'll
start 2019 with the new site. Or not. Maybe it's fine to just scatter
wildflower seeds across the wasteland of the internet without
claiming a whole garden as mine. Anyway. If you like this and want to
read more of the Criticism & Love essays, please sign up here: it
might help persuade someone to publish them in an actual book one
day. Even if you don't, still sign up, cos Andy's essays are fucking
brilliant. OK, here goes:
What is the point of
theatre?
I mean, really?
Please don't think that
calling what you make or see or write about or have an interest in
performance art means I'm not asking you too.
Here are some of the
things that have happened in the world in the four weeks since I last
sat down to write one of these C&L essays:
Brett Kavanaugh was
sworn in as the 114th Justice of the Supreme Court, a lifelong role,
despite allegations of sexual abuse against him and his readiness to
limit abortion rights in the US.
Jair Bolsonaros was
elected President of Brazil, despite expressions of homophobia and
misogyny and his readiness to raze the Amazon rainforest, killing
indigenous populations through displacement in the short term, future
generations through climate destruction in the longer term.
The New York Times
reported that Donald Trump wants to create a legal definition of sex
as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at
birth", erasing trans identities.
As reported in the
Guardian, the IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) warned that humans have 12 years left to limit temperature
rises “to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will
significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and
poverty for hundreds of millions of people”.
The Guardian also
reported that “humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish
and reptiles since 1970” (figure provided by WWF).
A white supremacist man
opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 Jewish people
aged between 54 and 97.
Another white man was
filmed verbally abusing a black woman on a Ryanair plane, later
claiming, eroneously, that he is not a racist person.
Twenty traders of
international backgrounds working in Ridley Road market in Dalston,
east London, were issued evictions orders and given two weeks to
comply. They were granted a last-minute reprieve but at present it's
unknown whether that will last beyond 2018.
Residents and
campaigners attempting to save the community-run Tidemill Wildlife
Garden in Deptford from destruction/redevelopment were violently
evicted by police and security staff working on council orders.
And this is just what
I've skimmed from the surface of my twitter feed.
*
There's a show by
Breach called The Drill, from 2017, in which the three performers –
Ellice Stevens, Amarnah Amuludun and Luke Lampard, directed by Billy
Barrett, with video by Dorothy Allen-Pickard – take part in a
series of training courses, sold to the public, to learn what they
might do in the event of a terrorist attack, a bomb threat, a
shooting, etc. “Everything feels very uncertain right now,” says
Luke. “So we wanted to do something to make ourselves feel safer.”
And so they attend workshops, imagine, improvise, role-play, act.
Time and again the instructors impress on them the importance of
realism. “Realism is everything,” says one. “If it's not
realistic, if the training's not realistic, then people don't have
the fear.” If you've felt that fear, stress, pressure in a training
environment, it won't shock you when you feel it in a real
environment. You need to immerse yourself, really take part, more
effectively to learn. “The way people learn best is in a safe and
controlled environment,” says another. “So while we will make it
as realistic as we possibly can in this circumstance, it will be safe
and it will be controlled.”
These are at once
rehearsals and acts of theatre; as theatre they are events with the
potential to produce catharsis, a safe and controlled experience of
fear in a safe and controlled environment. Which, for Aristotle, was
really the point of theatre. The growing feeling through The Drill,
however, is that all this training is pointless: not only does it not
diminish fear, it exacerbates a latent suspicion of other humans, and
with it a latent othering and racism. And if the training is
pointless, maybe theatre is pointless too. Certainly – and this
might be a delicious in-joke – “realistic” theatre.
There's a show by
Breach called The Beanfield, from 2015, in which the six performers –
Billy Barrett, Grace Holme, Anna Himali Howard, Max Kennedy, Ellice
Stevens and Tom Wright, directed by Billy and, on video, film-maker
Dorothy Allen-Pickard – re-enact but also investigate the ethics
around re-enacting the clash between police and military on the one
side, and on the other a motley convoy of people including activists,
non-violent protestors and peaceful worshippers of the solstice
heading for the Stonehenge Free Festival in June 1985. The clash was
a climax reached after months of aggression directed at the
travelling community camped there. The performers were students at
University of Warwick at the time, and had been involved in their own
clash with police, called in to break up student protests against the
neoliberal profit drive of their own education.
The group wanted to
make this show, Ellice says early on, to do something real. “So
real.” A specialist in historical re-enactment warns them to
“be careful” because the real of performance can all too quickly
become the real of life: pretend violence becoming actual violence,
pretend hate becoming actual hate. The man who now owns the field
where the clash happened refuses to let them perform there, because
he's afraid of what trouble – real – they might stir up. They
find a field and go ahead anyway; Grace gets hit and tells her
friends: “This is really fucking painful.” There is video playing
of the re-enactment and it looks really fucking painful, feels
actually painful to watch. “It's really fucking horrible,” Grace
says again. And it is. I mean, it's only theatre. But it feels
horrible. Because it's also, as Dorothy says on the video, “a real
event”. Historical real. Present real. Now real.
There's a show by
Breach called Tank, from 2016, in which the four performers –
Ellice Stevens, Victoria Watson, Joe Boylan and Craig Hamilton,
directed by Billy and Ellice, again with video by Dorothy –
question what of historical events can really be pieced together from
the documentary material and memories that remain. The story of Tank
is of a research centre on the US Virgin Island of St Thomas in
which, during the early 1960s, a series of experiments was conducted
in teaching dolphins to speak English. It's also a story about what a
particular dolphin, Peter, might have been thinking, feeling, trying
to communicate during these experiments. Because who can know?
Dolphins have an “alien brain”, it's said at the beginning;
that's why they were chosen for the research. Perhaps if this alien
brain could be taught English, so could all the aliens who might be
discovered during the space race – but so too might all the aliens
who live on the earth itself, all those other, foreign people whose
customs are, within the dictates of xenophobia, so unfamiliar and
terrifying.
There's a book by
academic Nicholas Ridout called Theatre & Ethics that considers
how theatre “participates in a process of managing the way people
think about their relationships with one another and their potential
for creating societies in which everyone can enjoy freedom as well as
social solidarity”. He begins with Plato, who lambasted theatre
because “it peddles dangerously pessimistic illusions that
encourage a fearful audience to submit to inexorable fate rather than
struggle to imagine the world differently”. Throughout Ridout
raises the question “How shall I act?”, but always with the
caveat that theatre might be an odd place to come looking for that,
given the relationships between ethics and truth, theatre and
pretending. He resists theatre that presents a “universal concept
of 'human' which … can easily lapse into 'humans like me'”,
seeking out instead performance that challenges “our conception of
what it is to have a human body, and to have intentions that make it
do things … challeng[ing] the human spectator to consider what it
is that allows him or her to recognise another as a fellow human”.
He searches for that “moment of ethical encounter” in performance
that can “be the basis for thought, feeling or action within the
sphere of politics”. That, for him, is the point of theatre.
*
Here is a full list of
the works I've encountered in a theatre or theatre setting in the
four weeks since I last sat down to write one of these C&L
essays:
Risk Lab, by Ada
Mukhina, a participatory performance that invited its audience to
decide whether they wanted to hear a text written by Ada that might
be censored in Russia, where she is from, or in London/the UK, and
rather than delivering on that vote, asked a series of questions
about why each person had chosen the way they did.
The Malady of Death,
written by Alice Birch, directed by Katie Mitchell, contemplating the
mesh of relationships between masculinity, emotion(lessness),
pornography and misogyny.
Summit, by Andy Smith
(twice, for work), a brief rallying cry for better talking, and
better listening, and more readiness to change, to do the work of
social/political/economic change, performed in three languages:
English, British Sign Language and (in this performance) Malay
(although I've also seen it when the third language was Farsi, spoken
by a young man, and miss the complexity that brought).
Burgerz, by Travis
Alabanza, in which the burger thrown at Travis on Waterloo Bridge by
a white man affronted by what he perceived as their failure to
conform to patriarchal notions of gender becomes a metaphor through
which those notions can be interrogated and smashed.
ear for eye by debbie
tucker green, which is phenomenal, a survey of black life within
white supremacy, meticulous in expression as it travels between the
personal and the systemic, poetic in its protest, as elegant as it is
angry, a defining play not only of this decade but – I'm sure of
this – the decades to come.
Fallen Fruit, by
Katherina Radeva of Two Destination Language, in which she traces the
complex experiences of herself, as a seven-year-old child, and the
adults around her in Bulgaria in the days before and immediately
after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the basic sufficiency before, the
deprivation after; the tedium before, the freedom after, the strained
commonality before, the pained inequality after.
Lock Her Up, three
audio works, by Sabrina Mahfouz, Rachel Mars and Paula Varjack, each
responding to aspects of women's experience in prison. I sat in a now
disused prison cell beneath Leeds Town Hall and listened to the
pieces in that order, experiencing mounting anxiety as I moved from
Sabrina as a scintillating game-show host asking furious questions
about incarceral maternity and motherhood, to Rachel's whispers in
the silence of solitary confinement, and Paula's story of an imminent
future in which immigrant women are increasingly detained as they no
longer conform to invisibly shifting immigration policy, which ends
with one such woman beating a prison guard with a pole, his skin and
muscles collapsing with a squelch, squelch, squelch.
All those plus I'm a
Phoenix, Bitch by Bryony Kimmings, No One Is Coming To Save You by
new company This Noise, a merging of Othello and Macbeth by Jude
Christian, Paper Cinema's Macbeth, a musical version of Twelfth Night
(you bet it was too much fucking Shakespeare), Andy Smith's The
Preston Bill for the sixth time, two R&D rehearsal sharings and
two work-in-progress performances of #thebabyquestion by Paula
Varjack, Luca Rutherford and Catriona James, Mouth Open Story Jump
Out by Polar Bear, The Day I Fell Into a Book by Lewis Gibson,
Charlie Ward by Sound & Fury, Frankenstein by BAC's Beatbox
Academy, Chekhov's First Play by Dead Centre for the second time, and
yes, you're right, I do see an awful lot of theatre. I'm choosing the
word awful for its double meaning.
In the midst of all
that, I also saw It's True, It's True, It's True by Breach.
*
It's True is another
re-enactment play, of the trial, in 1612, of Agostino Tassi, the
older man and established artist accused by painter Artemesia
Gentileschi (a teenager at the time) of rape. The word accused there
should not imply I don't believe her. It's quite different from
Breach's other work: there's no video, and the three performers –
Ellice Stevens, Kathryn Bond and Harriet Webb, directed by Billy
Barrett, Dorothy Allen-Pickard joining them as dramaturg – never
slip out of character to speak as themselves, so there is no
metatheatrical discussion of how or why they're making each dramatic
choice, or what the effect of those choices might be. This time the
lines between verbatim speech transcribed by court notaries and
imagined text are entirely blurred. So what is true, exactly?
It's certainly not true
that the three women never slip out of character, because they are
constantly slipping into and out of a series of characters: Artemesia
is played by Ellice, Tassi by Harriet, and Artemesia's female
neighbour Tuzia by Kathryn, but they also take turns to play the
judge, Tassi's friends, other witnesses in the case, Bible characters
painted by Artemesia, and more. Nor is it entirely true that they
never play themselves: in the presentation of a woman struggling to
be believed, fighting against a patriarchal system that sets man's
word above woman's, that internalises misogyny to such an extent that
women become the judge and jury of each other, Ellice and Harriet and
Kathryn never stop playing themselves.
Another thing that's
not true is that they don't question or justify their artistic
choices: it's just that their choices snap into focus through an
astonishing speech Artemesia makes explaining why her painting
Susanna and the Elders is different to depictions of the story by
male artists of the day. In men's eyes Susanna was courting the male
gaze, asking for it. Asking for it. Whereas in Artemesia's eyes
Susanna was unable to escape that gaze; she might turn away from it,
push back against it, but such is the aggression of masculinity she
is subject to it none the less.
How did the
relationship between Artemesia and Tassi begin? Tassi was asked by
her father to teach his daughter perspective. Perspective. The word
is like a punchline – or, as Hannah Gadsby lays the emphasis in
Nanette, a punch
line – to a really bad joke.
*
There's a book by
Rebecca Solnit called Hope in the Dark in which she describes world
events as taking place on the stage of a theatre. “The traditional
versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to
fix our gaze on that stage,” she says. But she draws her readers'
gaze to the “shadowy spaces” off-stage, to “the aisles,
backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work”.
What she's particularly interested in is “the power of a story and
of a storyteller” to move across these hidden places in the
margins, because “politics arises out of the spread of ideas and
the shaping of imaginations”, and what better way to spread ideas
and shape imaginations than through stories?
For Solnit, writing is
no different from activism: both are acts of faith, because their
effects are indirect, delayed and often invisible. “An essay, a
book, is one statement,” she writes, “in a long conversation you
could call culture or history; you are answering something or
questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the
response to your words may come long after you're gone and never
reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place.” And while
“changing the story isn't enough in itself … it has often been
foundational to real changes”.
Now I'm no Solnit,
however much I wish I were. And when I ask what the point is of
theatre, what I'm also or possibly really asking is: what is the
point of (me) being there and (me) writing about it, and beneath that
I guess what I'm really asking is what is the point of me? I'm
thinking about this sharply not only because it feels like that
theatre of world events is on fire right now and always has been, the
gaze of the audience drawn not by the limelights as Solnit suggests
but the glare of blazing flame, but because the response my words
make to it keeps feeling so fucking paltry. Whatever I'm writing
about, I repeat and repeat the same words – patriarchy, capitalism,
neoliberalism, inequality are some of the key ones – as though
intoning them as a mantra might do anything to dismantle their power.
This is the sixth essay I've written for C&L (number 6.5 if you
want to be precise), and each one has basically said the same thing:
patriarchy is bad, capitalism is bad, neoliberalism is bad,
inequality is bad, feminism hasn't solved any of this, fuck. What
good is that doing in the world?
As I muddle through
identity crisis number 17,962, there's something in Solnit's
description of the long conversation, the call and the response, that
I want to hold on to – hold faith in – not least because it's
echoed in the final section of Ridout's Theatre & Ethics. Quoting
a text by Adrian Heathfield, Ridout describes that “moment of
ethical encounter” as “a reciprocal and unending cycle of
call-and-response, of gift and counter-gift”. And “the act of
critical writing about performance” is part of that: a recognition
of “response-ability”. The ethical encounter couldn't happen
without the witness, the spectator, the person in the audience
“called upon to recognise that there is a relationship between what
is shown in the theatre and their own experience of the world”, and
“invited to do something about it”.
I have to keep
returning to ideas like this because it's all the self-justification
I have for the amount of time I spend, physically and mentally, in
theatre, and for the fear that all I'm really doing is entertaining
myself and hiding from life, never participating in what might
genuinely be described as “action within the sphere of politics”.
I have to keep reminding myself that I share Solnit's belief in
stories, and belief in the need for different stories, and that's
what I'm doing with the response-ability theatre encourages in me,
trying to tell different stories.
It's True, It's True,
It's True is a story of a rape. It is a story of a woman who would
have married her rapist to maintain her dignity. He refused, and so
she was able to do something better. She was able to paint. To paint
stories told by men from a female perspective. At the end she enters
another of her paintings, one of her many versions of the slaughter
of Holofernes by Judith. Here's what the stage directions say about
her entrance: “Judith appears in a golden dress. She is a rockstar,
a guardian angel, the embodiment of rage.” And here's what the
character says: “The names of my foremothers may be forgotten but
yours and mine will never be.” Because it's not true that It's True
is the story of a rape, a story that seeks to be a silencing and a
full stop. It's the story of female anger, female defiance, female
strength.
It's a story that needs
to be told and retold and retold because patriarchy too is angry,
defiant and strong, but more than that, patriarchy is powerful, in
power, perpetually in power. And none of us know when this will
change.
*
I've never asked or
read why Billy, Dorothy and Ellice chose the name Breach for their
company, but it makes me think of that rallying cry Shakespeare has
Henry V deliver on the point of battle: “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends.” Only here, the breach is not a war, but a space in
which to rage, yes, argue, yes, confront, yes, but also care,
speculate, listen, think, see things from a different angle, reshape
ideas around community. All of which, really, is the point of
theatre. Isn't it?
With that, dear
friends, once more unto the breach we go.
