Monday, 18 August 2014
each in their own way flailing
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
It's Thursday 24 July and for the third
night this week a man is stood below my sitting-room window, singing.
Once upon a time I dreamed of being serenaded like this, by some
floppy-haired indie-boy-prince of my dreams, but reality is crueller
than fancy. What this stranger calls singing is obstreperous,
grinding, brutally unintelligible; a noise steadfast and oppressive
as the roar of machinery. On the first two nights I think about
calling the police, and then I remember the treatment that someone
who might be homeless and might be alcoholic and might be mentally
unstable is likely to get at the hands of the Met and berate myself
for my lack of patience or understanding. I think about going
downstairs and trying to talk to him but shrink in fear of what power
a man who has apparently lost all sense of spacial or social
awareness might be able to wield over me. On the third night I give
up trying to work to this enervating soundtrack and stand by the
window and watch him. He wears a black leather jacket and carries a
violin case over his shoulder and mostly his hair is grey. Sometimes
he sits on the stoop directly below, swaying and stamping an unruly
punctuation. Sometimes he follows other men across the road, kicks at
the bins, wanders into the distance, the volume barely decreasing.
For a few glorious minutes he is quiet, and I discover it's because
the young homeless man with the gentle smile is rolling him a
cigarette and talking calmly with him, a gesture of fathomless
generosity. (Later, when I ask the young homeless man about this
encounter, he has no idea who I'm talking about. The men who speak to
him are interchangeable.)
When the ranting begins again, I do my
best to tune in my hearing, dialling through the static until I hit
the man's frequency. What emerges, on repeat, is a word,
“misunderstood”, and a question: “Why won't they just let me
be?” In a flash, I'm reminded of Dave, the drunk homeless character
in Stella Duffy's The Room of Lost Things, once married and a
businessman, now accustomed to the simple routine of living in a
lager-fuelled haze on a moulding sofa dumped on a backstreet. Dave
has found, if not contentment, at least a dull calm. But this man is
neither content nor calm. He is the embodiment of fury, of the sheer
fucking insult that it is to be human and alive.
The following day, Friday 25 July, the
man isn't on the street below my window. He's on stage at the Royal
Court instead.
*
This Royal Court preview is my second
encounter with Men in the Cities and I still can't hold this bit of
text in my head. I was there for the first read-through in the
rehearsal room, a small expectant group of us huddled round a table,
Chris anxious and placatory of voice, his director, Wendy Hubbard,
frowning as she annotates her script. I don't look at the script: I
just listen. But I can't find the frequency for this specific torrent
of words, unleashed by a bereaved father in the general direction of
a 6-foot-9 gay black man who sings transcendentally on the glittering
streets of Christmas. A torrent of words directed at patriarchy and
capitalism and whatever that is up in the sky (God or the stars or
maybe just satellites), defiant yet desperate for redemption. When
Chris unleashes it he raises his voice and I'm instantly reminded of
the preacher segment of God/Head, failing to notice the difference in
register. In the rehearsal room, this feels like the least effective
bit of text. But in the Royal Court, it feels electric.
I visited this rehearsal room only
twice, seeing Chris work with text and intonation but not with
movement or setting. Which means much of what I see on stage is a
surprise. Intermittently I regret being part of the company, because
it makes me unable to watch this preview for myself: instead I'm
distracted by the rest of the audience. I note their laughter, the
moments of frisson, and where their attention begins to wander. I
note how nervous Chris sounds, not just at the beginning but
throughout. I note the exactitude of Katharine Williams' lighting:
the soft peach that envelops the young gay lovers, the harsher white
cast on grit-hard Graham; I note how each click of the bulbs
economically transforms the mood and the scene, making it distinct to
each character. I note that I feel emotionally disconnected, and not
fully convinced that the text is working.
But then Chris unleashes that
torrential rant, and the way he twists his body around it is
astonishing. As he shouts he clutches at the air, as if trying to
prise answers from its atoms. Initially he leans into the microphone,
then gradually pulls away, still ranting, but staggering now,
flailing, stamping and swaying, bent over with the weight of anger
and resentment and unbearable sorrow, drunk on the indignity of being
human and alive. And the transcendent singing stops but the rant goes
on, as steadfast and oppressive as the roar of machinery. My father
and his father and his father. Misunderstood. Misunderstood.
Misunderstood.
Later, as we walk down the stairs to
the tube, my husband tells me he found this bit awkward, and thought
that was because it wasn't working, but then he realised the
awkwardness was his own, because the rant is abominably raw, and he
wanted to protect himself from it.
Later still, in bed, staring into the
dark, I remembered that I'd seen the staggering man another time. He
was in a basement room in Shoreditch Town Hall. And this man didn't
survive.
*
This latest bout of whatever it is –
depression? Suffocating sadness? Desire to just fucking stop and live
in a limbo of quiet, feeling nothing? – began to seep through me a
few days before seeing Leo Kay's It's Like He's Knocking, on Friday
11 July. Sometimes the show feels like a dangerous place to be. It
starts in a darkened bar, Kay raising a toast to “telling it like
it is, even if you don't know how it was”. We each drink a shot but
he drinks at least four, and there is something so careless in this
action that the basement room in Shoreditch Town Hall begins to hum
with worry for him. We move to another room, fitted up like a meagre
bedsit, and anxiety grows. Alcohol ran through the blood of his
forefathers, and depression, and loneliness, and uncertainty. My
father and his father and his father, Kay cries, not in words so
much as the pulse of the heart. This is a story of wild coincidences
and wilder adventure, and the overwhelming fear that, however damaged
your ancestors, you will never, never live up to them. It's a story
of choosing to live and choosing to die: and if you chose the latter,
how would you do it? With a noose in the toilet or jumping off a tall
building? Or the way Kay's grandfather chose, alone in a bedsit in
the centre of London, with the door and windows sealed and the gas of
the oven filling the room?
It's a dangerous place to be, but Kay
offers a measure of care. He fills our eyes with beautiful images:
the light that beams through a makeshift porthole on the ship that
carried his grandfather to America; the descriptions of the women his
grandfather loved; the glow of a beach in Israel. He fills our ears
with gorgeous sounds: a charged exchange between tambourine and
accordion; the growl of Leadbelly, the wash of the sea. Kay's own
voice, the amber of whiskey, the keen of viola. On one wall he's
pinned a note that reads, very roughly: depression grows in the gap
between the story you tell about yourself and the truth. Like there's
a truth. Kay's honesty feels like a gift: by now, in his early 40s,
he'd thought he would be a father himself. And he didn't expect his
father to have died. The show becomes a eulogy, for complicated
relationships with difficult men, whose absence creates a void in the
soul. A void Kay fills with this performance, dedicated to his father
and his father, fragile and tender and spare.
But every time Kay reaches for a
bottle, a shiver runs through the audience. There is relief in the
fact of this work being a collaboration, with the audience who
willingly engage in a wager (in a sense, to save him), and with a
Brazilian musician whose thrumming soundtrack heightens the
impression of extended ritual – a ritual that culminates in the
summoning of a spirit, as Kay, now dressed in a suit, hair slicked
back, throat burning with booze, re-creates with swaggering gestures
an 8mm film in which his grandfather imitates Charlie Chaplin. Strobe
lights flicker like the shake of the movie, and Kay – or his
grandfather – stamps and sways and barely stays upright. And even
if this is meant to be a happy film, I don't read joy in these
flailing movements. Kay's grandfather is twisted or bent over with
the weight of anger and resentment and unbearable sorrow. He is drunk
with the indignity of being human and alive.
*
And now it's Thursday 14 August and I'm
wondering if Chris has been really fucking irresponsible in detailing
with such precision another way to die.
And I start thinking about Dead Line,
by Jo Bannon: a show made to create space for people to face up to
the inevitability of death. To talk about that with someone whose
professional life puts them in close contact with death, and then
think about it in solitude. I sat in its final room, bathed in light,
gazing through the window at the milky sky and the distant activity
of a public square, and wondered how long I've been frightened, not
of death, but of living. Maybe I'm not thinking of the show itself
but the conversation I had with Jo on the street after, in which she
told me why she'd made this work, and I told her how I'd responded to
it, together making a space for each other to talk about death openly
and honestly, exactly as Dead Line had intended.
And I think back to the night before,
Wednesday 13 August, when, on the insistence of my friend David, I
went to see Scott Capurro. It's a complicated experience: part of me
feels guilty for laughing at anything so relentlessly offensive, part
of me relishes the scabrous insult and outrageous performance of it,
part of me wishes that he were as inventive (or perhaps loving) with
his misogyny as he is with his racism. But mostly I'm fascinated by
the unexpected resonances with Men in the Cities. I hear it in the
moment when Scott praises the audience for careful listening,
because: “Listening is the most radical thing we can do.” And
again in two startling, abrupt shifts in tone, the first fleeting,
the second sustained. The show overruns because Scott, with absolute
sincerity, gets carried away telling us about the final days of his
mother's life, and the absurd events of her funeral. But when he
talks about his mother, you can tell that his thoughts are also with
Robin Williams, who died two days before. And those thoughts erupt
mid-set, when Scott leans into the microphone and demands: “If
you're funny and rich and successful and [I can't remember the fourth
thing], and even you can't make it, what hope have the rest of us
got?”
*
I see Men in the Cities on my own on
Sunday 10 August and cry repeatedly and with a sense of release.
Chris isn't nervous any more and I'm less distracted by the rest of
the audience and I feel the play swell through me and I know that it
works. It really fucking works.
I'm anxious about most things at the
moment so it's no surprise that the thought of writing about Men in
the Cities from the midst of indeterminate sadness or maybe
depression and certainly a desire to sink into nothingness has been
making me anxious. Chris is directly addressing a crisis among men,
of mental illness leading to suicide, and much in the experience and
perspective of his characters is specific to masculinity and distant
from me. Me, whose experience of depressionorwhatever corresponds
altogether too frequently to my menstrual cycle, which basically
makes me a running joke. (Although my – male – GP told me last
year that menstrual-depression is particularly hard to address so,
y'know, fuck you with your snides and eye-rolls.) A few days after
seeing Chris at the Royal Court I'm listening to Parquet Courts
(brief aside: I fucking love Parquet Courts, and this piece from Rolling Stone is just perfect in its articulation of how idiotic and
resplendent that feels), and more than once they narrate the same
specificity and distance. Especially in this song:
so caustic in its delineation of the
meagre opportunities afforded young men. Chris is talking about the
violence wreaked on men, of all ages, by patriarchal structures of
masculinity. I don't want my female/feminist self getting in the way.
On the face of it, Men in the Cities
seems grievously non-feminist: there are almost no female characters
– a dead wife is mentioned, and a divorced wife, plus two girls on
scooters and a group of women doing yoga, mocked as fat and
ridiculous, and that's pretty much it. But Chris isn't dealing with
the face of things. He's digging much deeper than that, taking a
scalpel to Conservative society to cut through the lie of its
blustering surface, revealing everything broken and crushed beneath.
The young man who commits suicide despite being in a loving
relationship and the widowed ex-serviceman who no longer sees a world
he believes in and the boy in primary school who cries in the
bathroom because he has no idea how to be. The first time I
encountered that boy, Rufus, in the rehearsal room, I thought he was
repulsive. Absolutely fucking terrifying. He watches hardcore porn
and attacks other boys in the school toilets and teases older men and
treats pretty much everything – school, parents, bike – with
contempt. But the moment Chris put him on stage, Rufus became...
adorable. A little scared boy trying to be a man, and utterly
confused about what that means. The scene from which the play takes
its title, when Rufus stands before a work of art and feels himself
welling up as he recognises its obstreperous, grinding, brutal
humanity, is extraordinary. In Chris' words, each of the men in this
work are “drawn contorted in a different way, in his own way,
flailing. As though falling, or fallen, or twisted somehow or bent.”
Exactly the same words could be used to describe each of the men in
his play. Especially flailing: every single one of them is flailing,
in a sea of what might be called depression or suffocating sadness,
or simply loneliness. Loneliness oozes from these lives like slow
poison. A loneliness heavy with anger and resentment and unbearable
sorrow and the indignity of being alive.
The one balm Chris has to offer is
feminism: a radical politics of empathic humanity that seeks to
dismantle those repressive patriarchal structures and build more
equitable, communal, supportive ways of living instead. “Can we not
just put it all down,” Chris asks, except he's not really asking,
because there's no question mark there, in the text or his delivery.
Put down the competition and the aggression and the attitudes of
destruction, and pick up compassion instead.
*
It's lunchtime on Thursday 14 August
and my friend Jake tells me that if I want to stop writing about
theatre then I should stop already. That's the thing about
depressionorwhatever: the insecurity it brings on is just fucking
boring. Later I fall while running, jolting the shoulder I broke in
April, giving physical form to this pathetic inner fragility. Later I
see Will Eno's Title and Deed, and it's basically a rehash of Will
Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing), which is to say breathtakingly
exquisite. I'm not exaggerating: there are several moments when my
chest hurts from not being able to breathe. Maybe it's when the
character – a man in middle age, flailing, lonely, twisted somehow,
suffocating – says: “I don't want to paint too dreary a picture
of my misery. I have laughed. … Don't pity me, is all I'm saying.”
Or when he says: “I had occasion – this is embarrassing – to
question my existence. Not in big ways.” Or when he says: “Time,
place, happiness. It's only three words. I should have been able to
figure it out.” Or when he says: “Women care more about the
world. It's bigger for them. That's why it's sadder when they die.”
Or when he says: “Don't get lost for too long. They stop looking
eventually.” No matter how pitch-perfect Conor Lovett's performance
– and really, the cadence of it, the fall of every comma and the
breath of every pause, is just so – there's something off-key about
Eno spoken in an Irish accent. My brain seems to perform a
simultaneous translation into American. And another simultaneous
translation into me.
Don't get lost for too long. They stop
looking eventually.
*
And now I'm home and the children are
still the children and the hours are still the hours and the
confusion is still suffocating and the sadness is still heavy. I am
human and I am alive and I am flailing. I read another terrific blogpost by Katherine Mitchell, on her experience of depression. And then
I retreat to the kitchen and I bake. Recently I realised that
whenever I make something particularly chocolatey and particularly
unhealthy I want to share it with Chris, which is pretty fucking
perverse considering he has diabetes. So as I baked on Saturday night
I thought of Chris and this is the recipe I made and it's dedicated
to him.
I've made this twice now, differently
each time, and it's basically an off-the-top-of-my-head adaptation of
a brownie recipe in the first Ottolenghi cookbook. Very roughly it
involves putting a lot of chocolate (let's say 175g) and a lot of
butter (also 175g) in a saucepan with a wodge of molasses sugar (125g
or so) and heating it gently, stirring to melt the sugar. Very
roughly it involves beating two eggs gently with a fork, stirring in
75g or so of light muscovado sugar, then stirring in maybe 100g of
flour, or maybe 80g flour and 20g cocoa powder. Very roughly it
involves lining an 18-20cm square baking tin with paper or foil and
tipping half a jar of apricot jam in, preferably jam that has been
lying around in the cupboard for over a year so you feel almost
virtuous for using it up. Very roughly it involves stirring the
chocolate-butter-sugar mixture into the egg-sugar-flour mixture,
adding a few drops of vanilla or a shake of cinnamon or mixed spice
if you want, or not bothering, as I did; then very roughly pouring
the chocolate mixture over the jam and baking this in an oven heated
to gas 3 or about 165 degrees for something like 25 minutes. What
comes out – and you have to leave it in the tin for a bit before
taking it out, otherwise the jam spills everywhere – is essentially
a slapdash and graceless Sachertorte, and self-pity eating of the
very highest order.
Monday, 4 August 2014
Meaning, value, and matters of opinion
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
Indulge me. I want to remember this
one.
We're sitting at the dinner table, me
and the kids, and my daughter – my restless, anxious, furiously
competitive, fiercely brilliant (not, I hope, matter of opinion)
daughter – starts asking me about boarding school. Which turns into
a conversation about state and private schools, and why parents might
choose to send their children to each place, and the class
connotations attached to them. Children who go to private school are
supposed to be more clever, aren't they, she remarks. Well, I
explain, they have to pass an entrance exam, but they also have the
opportunity to sit the exam, they have access. We talk about the
reputation that attaches to different education systems, including
university; the blanket accusation that Oxbridge people are
privileged, that ignores the specific circumstances of them being
there. Then she asks whether everyone who goes to art school becomes
an artist. Actually, I say, a little maudlin, most of them become
teachers. It's really hard to become an artist – at least, an
artist who earns money from their work. You have to be really good to
become an artist, she suggests. Well, yes, I propose, but I know a
lot of people who are fantastic artists, yet struggle to earn money
from it. I don't mean to be rude, she says, but I think that's just
your opinion that they're really good. (At this point, it takes every
ounce of effort not to laugh, not because what she says is funny, but
because my brain is reeling at the way that, at seven, she sounds so
grown up.) Her comment feels particularly barbed because I have,
among others, Chris Goode in my head as we talk; there's truth in
that, I admit – but as an artist, there are other ways of thinking
about what you earn: you might not be rich in terms of money, but
there's psychic value, you have a richness in your brain and in your
heart. It's a chewy idea, for both of us. So we chew on it.
*
Between the NPO announcements (that
tells you how long I've been writing this), reading the Brooklyn
Commune Project's unspeakably brilliant document The View From Here,
spending a Sunday morning with Jo Crowley talking about the #I'llShow You Mine campaign, trying to write Dialogue's first Grant for
the Arts application, and discovering that in the three months
following the end of my Guardian contract I barely earned £1500,
I've been doing a lot of thinking about money lately. Money in
relation to time, money in relation to value, and money in relation
to ambition. I spent most of Autumn 2013 writing applications for the
Arts
Foundation award for cultural journalism, and
what would have been a mind-bogglingly massive grant, the Paul
Hamlyn Foundation Arts Breakthrough Fund; both
failed. I spent a lot of Spring 2014 thinking about funding
applications, too, but peripherally this time: supporting Mary
Paterson in applying for a Grant for the Arts for our new digital
project Something Other; doing some editing work on LIFT's NPO
application; and as an adjunct of Chris Goode & Company, also
applying to be an NPO. Mary and LIFT both got the money, which is
just as well, because otherwise I'd feel proper hexed now. Also,
everything that follows might just read like sour grapes. Maybe
that's all it is. But there's a resonance in the three rejections
that has given me pause, and sharpened an ongoing question about the
existent structures of money and the difficulty of establishing new
ones.
I don't recall getting any feedback in
my rejection letter from the Arts Foundation. My application was based on completing the CG&Co God/Head project (which I eventually
did, between paid work), buckling down to the documentation of
Dialogue's residency at BAC during their Summer 2013 Scratch season
(which still languishes on the to-do list), and developing further
“embedded criticism” projects with Dialogue (pretty much all
possibilities in this direction have floundered over the past few
months, due to the lack of my time/their money). My friend Matt Trueman was on the judging panel, so I asked him for feedback: he told me that the process had made him realise how important the
audience is for journalism, and that my application fell down because
there wasn't a clear sense of who the readership for my proposal
would be.
My Paul Hamlyn feedback was brief but really
positive, almost frustratingly so. I'd applied to establish Dialogue
as a full-time organisation, with an advisory board, the means to
commission, a publishing arm, a focus on community work, and a
dedication to travelling across the UK, mentoring local critics and
linking them into a national network. The judges were, I was told,
very engaged in the idea, and felt I had a very distinct vision, but
in the end they'd “preferred other applications”. Where I fell
down was in the articulation of a long-term business plan: they
couldn't see how Dialogue would become self-sufficient, or how I
could create a sustainable income stream to take us beyond the
Breakthrough Fund's three-year offer. Which is fair, because neither
could I.
The rejection letter sent to CG&Co
from ACE was the most infuriating, because that also contained the
“we preferred other applications” line, which felt much more
disheartening in this instance – a value judgement, almost. But I
perked up looking at the bit on the feedback form about money. It
recognised that the company demonstrates good financial health,
realistic budgets and increasing turnover. But where, ACE wanted to
know, was the “budgeting for office or utility costs”? It's all
well and good wittering on about art, but if you're not planning for
printer ink and paperclips, you clearly haven't a clue.
I'll be the first to admit I'm quite
stupid when it comes to money. No, that's not it: I'm indifferent to
money, until it feels like I haven't got any and I panic. But from
that place of stupid indifference I feel like there's a correlation
in all these rejections, which is less to do with money than a fault
in imagination. Throughout the (very supportive) PHF process, I was
assured that the Breakthrough Fund was particularly interested in
helping nascent organisations flourish into full existence; Dialogue,
however, was too nascent, and needed to demonstrate a recognisable
business structure to encourage the Foundation to feel the money was
going to reliable hands. There could be no learning on the job here.
The Arts Foundation rubric suggested it was interested in “the
changing landscape cultural journalism is currently going through”,
yet Matt's feedback implied that writing for a known readership
attached to trusted outlets was more attractive to the judges than
striking out across that changing landscape to build a new audience.
My favourite is the CG&Co stuff, which confirms something I'd
suspected of the NPO application process all along: ACE is more
concerned with accountancy than art. Its focus is on bricks and
mortar, offices and bureaucracy, what CG&Co producer Ric Watts
calls “lumbering infrastructure”. Not the ephemeral stuff that nourishes
people and speaks to their lives. (When I was writing this earlier, I forgot that Ric and I had an email conversation about the presentation of a business plan not being a requirement of CG&Co's NPO application. He would happily have provided one, which would have demonstrated that the company runs a "pretty paperless" operation, if asked.)
I spent a chunk of June writing my
first big essay on CG&Co (for an American journal, published in
December), thinking across a few strands of its work. It led me back
to a post on Chris' blog, from August 2010, quoting a passage from
John Holloway's Crack Capitalism: “Stop making capitalism and do
something else, something sensible, something beautiful and
enjoyable. Stop creating the system that is destroying us.” The NPO
is structured to support capitalism. But CG&Co aren't trying to
make more capitalism: they're – we're – trying to make something
else. The same is true of Dialogue, which rejects the commodity
culture that's suffocating theatre criticism, and of me as a writer –
which is, of course, why I've barely earned £1500 in the past three
months, despite working constantly. (I think of this, the writing I
do here, as work. That's probably a mistake. Also, when I say
constantly, the last time I put in a 12-hour day was before the kids.
But the kids are the hardest fucking work I know.)
Patriarchal social systems, capitalism
included, renders those without money worthless. A lot of the
conversation around NPO “success” or “failure” felt difficult
to me, because – like with that “we preferred other
applications” – it was loaded with value judgements. People who
remained in the portfolio understandably, but thoughtlessly,
represented their continued funding as an endorsement of their work,
a sign of their value to ACE, to the arts, to the nation. Outside
commentators offered their congratulations for this “well-deservedrecognition of ambition and great work”. What does that imply about
those 58 organisations who were removed from the portfolio: was their
work small-minded and mediocre? At one point on twitter, the argument
was put forward that artists shouldn't be inside the establishment,
but I find that difficult, too, because everything is the
establishment. The landlord to whom you pay rent is part of the
establishment. The shop where you buy food is part of the
establishment. The electric lights you use when rehearsing and
performing a show make you complicit in upholding the establishment. Try not to
think so much about the truly
staggering amount of oil that it takes
to make a record...
There's a contradiction in all this
that I find impossible to resolve. Even if you're not building
capitalism, you still have to live in its world. If you want to build
new structures in which value isn't measured in money, and be
recognised and supported in doing so, you're going to need money to
do it. Alan Lane of Slung
Low and Tassos Stevens of Coney
spoke brilliantly about this at the In
Battalions festival: NPO funding has supported
them in creating public work without charging for tickets and running
a venue where audiences pay what they can (Slung Low), and locating
their work within principles of generosity and social responsibility
(Coney). Those companies would do those things without NPO funding.
But my guess is they'd find it harder, not least because money is a
magnet to money, funding attracts philanthropy, finance goes where
finance already is.
In the midst of writing this, I was
doing one of those tinkery internet searches that spirals in
serendipitous directions and landed on an interview
with Dave Eggers conducted in 2000 by a student
from Harvard. Again, indulge me: I've still not read any of Eggers'
books but adore him for his music writing. On Joanna Newsom: “Her
music has changed my life and will, I'm sure, make me a better
person. … [It's] making me braver, making me feel that with it I
could ride a horse. Into battle. A big horse into a big battle. This
music makes my heart feel stout, and enables me, with my eyes, to
breathe fire.” On the appropriate response to the Libertines'
Death on the Stairs: “You have to be moving
for this one, because it's messy and fast, as if the Clash met the
Jam and they went swimming in a dirty river. So walk along a crowded
street. … Actually, don't walk. … You need to stop and do a
dance. The dance you need to do is called the Charleston. ... Do it
quickly! Don't slow down. Why? Because the song will know! The
song is watching! You want the song to think it's not good enough
for three minutes and 24 seconds of the Charleston? Jesus.” (I
thought this was ridiculous but then I tried it and he's right.)
In the interview, Eggers gets really
angry with the interviewer's repeated suggestion that he's selling
out. Being critical, he argues, is easy, too easy. “To enjoy art
one needs time, patience, and a generous heart,” he counters. “It
is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and
understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what
matters.” And then comes the diatribe about money:
“A few months ago I wrote an article
for Time magazine and was paid $12,000 for it. [Excuse me for
interrupting but what the fucking $12,000 fuck!!!!!] I am
about to write something, 1,000 words, 3 pages or so, for something
called Forbes ASAP, and for that I will be paid $6,000. [!!!!!!!!!!]
For two years, until five months ago, I was on the payroll of ESPN
magazine, as a consultant and sometime contributor. I was paid
handsomely for doing very little. Same with my stint at Esquire. ...
“Do I care about this money? I do.
Will I keep this money? Very little of it. Within the year I will
have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and
individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who
makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going
into publishing books through McSweeney's. Would I have been able to
publish McSweeney's if I had not worked at Esquire? Probably not.
Where is the $6000 from Forbes going? To a guy named Joe Polevy, who
wants to write a book about the effects of radiator noise on children
in New England.”
And this, too, is the contradiction I
struggle against. Eggers knows that it's absurd, an abomination, for
a single person to acquire that much money. But he knows also that he
can enable a lot of people, a lot of art, with it, creating a
semblance of equality where the dominant structures would deny it. He
accepts, to do that, he needs to play capitalism's game. He puts a
positive spin on it: for him, all he's ever doing is saying yes
to every offer that comes along. But it's still saying yes to
capitalism's game.
Dialogue has existed for over two years
now; it's something Jake and I do in our spare time, between jobs,
between blogs, between (in my case) mothering. It has all sorts of
high ideals: we want to engage more with community work, with work
happening outside London, with mentoring young people – but we're
failing to fulfil them because time and money are limited. Even
saying that, I feel like the failure is in my imagination: for one
thing, I've read enough John Berger to know that if you're equating
time with money, as I do, constantly, you've let capitalist ideology
gobble you up and become part of the problem. If I wanted it enough,
I'd find more time, worry less about money, and just get on and do
it. But what I consistently see that Jake and I can't do without
money is extend our own collaboration or entice other people to work
with us – not without the guilt of making people do stuff
voluntarily, thus operating by the same neoliberal terms that I
abhor. The frustration of that is excruciating.
*
Writing that essay on CG&Co for the
American journal was also my first stab at writing about Stand, a
verbatim show Chris made for a community centre in Oxford, as part of
Oxford Playhouse's Plays Out strand, which aims to “connect people
through theatre”. Stand is subtitled “Ordinary people changing
the world”, and features six stories of people from the local
community talking about their activism. It's a quiet show about
speaking up, an undemonstrative show about demonstration. The words
are delivered by actors, who perform sitting in a row, scripts on
music stands just slightly to the left of their seats, small coffee
tables to their right on each of which sits a single prop, barely
used. The whole thing is so subdued that, especially with Chris'
punk-raucous staging of Mad Man still ringing in my ears, it was hard
at the beginning to stifle the thought that maybe, just maybe, I was
a little bit bored. But Stand is a show that creeps up on you. And
what creeps up is the idea that, although money bequeaths power, it's
not essential for change. Real change needs patience and generosity
and a fuckload of invisible work on something that matters.
The six characters, people, in a row
from left to right are:
A man in his 80s who, every Thursday
afternoon, stands outside a science lab protesting at the use of
animal testing. He's done this for aeons and he limits himself to
Thursday afternoon because outside of those hours he knows he'll be
arrested.
A much younger man who, as a student,
astonished the campaigns officer of his union by turning up at her
door saying he wanted to get involved. Because no one ever does that.
With friends he's set up the Reclaim Shakespeare Company to protest
against the sponsorship of theatre by the fossil-fuel industry.
They'll buy tickets for a show, sit near the front, then bounce on
stage when everyone's in their seats and deliver an impassioned
diatribe encouraging people to rip the BP logos from their
programmes.
A woman, middle-aged, a mother, who
insists she's not there in her own regard, but for her adopted
daughter. She talks about how she “didn’t want to raise a timid
child”, how she wanted her daughter to “be confident. To stand up
for what's right.” She gleams with pride as she relates how her
daughter, now in her early 20s, upbraided a posh woman on a bus for
being rude about a homeless man.
A man, also middle-aged, a photographer
who campaigned to save the alternative community that inhabited the
Jericho boatyard in Oxford, and prevent its replacement with a
development of luxury flats. The campaign was fraught and not wholly successful, and to a
degree that broke his spirit. He gave up photography and works as an
electrician now.
Another middle-aged woman who first
made a stand when, at the age of about five, she led her brother into
the middle of the road outside their house, to prove to him that: “We
have a right to go anywhere we like.” She now works giving
mental-health support to people who have come to Britain seeking
asylum, often after experiencing torture in their own countries.
Lastly, a younger woman who has taken
part in demonstrations such as Climate Camp, been arrested for
supergluing herself to a chair in the office of a PR company
identified to be in cahoots with the fracking industry, and now runs
a workshop at the heart of Oxford dedicated to teaching people how to
fix their bikes, and other make-do-and-mend practical skills
necessary to combat waste. “There should be workshops in the
middle of cities and communities,” she argues. “Shouldn’t all
be commercial space.”
Although equal in passion and
conviction, they come across as a disparate bunch. Some of them
conform to the identikit of activism focused on in media reports, but
others don't fit that picture at all. One of them is just a mum.
Another's activism includes nothing more demonstrative than putting
stickers on cars that park over pavements:
Until then it was almost like I was in
a fever of rage, because I felt so powerless about injustice, and I
think cars came to symbolise ‘might is right’, and oil-burning
getting priority, and just that act of putting a small sticker on a
windscreen, it was like cool air through my body. I no longer felt
that fury, cos there was something I could do. Now I’m a
middle-aged woman, and with a group of other middle-aged women, I
have gone out from time to time stickering cars in broad daylight,
and we’re invisible, because we’re middle-aged women.
It's a small act of defiance, this:
anyone in the audience could do it. And that's where the power of
Stand lies: in making activism not a separate activity, but something
each of us can and should engage in. I thought when watching it of
Harry Giles talking on twitter about the word activist, pointing out
how off-putting it can be, a badge of honour forging solidarity among
those who wear it proudly, but for the wary a barrier that prevents
them joining in. In Stand, being an activist is no different from
being a human who wants to respect other humans, and the environment,
and acts accordingly.
But Stand's power – its ability to
inspire empathy – also lies in the fact that not all of the
activism to which these people dedicate themselves is successful. The
photographer is exhausted by the stresses of working for the boatyard
community. The octogenarian has campaigned against animal testing for
most of his life, to no avail. To quote a recent Guardian headline,
Government
pushes ahead with fracking plan despite
widespread opposition. A chord of failure reverberates through Stand
– yet it doesn't condemn, and nor does it sentimentalise or overstate
what activism can achieve. It quietly positions activism within the
realm of ordinary activity, something that can sit within a weekly
routine, regular as doing the laundry; or in the spaces between
checking on a pudding in the oven. It argues that being an activist is part of being a parent: raising children to question the world as it is, and
contribute to building a better one. It makes anti-capitalist activity,
the work of building lives and communities around something other
than commerce and exploitation, something we can engage in together.
At any age, any stage in life. It feels like stealth dissidence. And
that realisation had me walking out in a quiver of excitement.
That approachability – reassuring
homeliness, almost – is supported by Stand's casting. So many of its actors would be recognisable from the television: there's
Cassandra from Only Fools and Horses, and the girl from Press Gang,
and that one was in Mona Lisa with Bob Hoskins. I abhor The Archers,
so I've no idea if one of those voices was recognisable from The
Archers, but maybe. The casting imbues the room with familiarity,
safety, the comfort of nostalgia – and that acts as a cushion for
stories that are present, challenging, unsafe sometimes, profoundly
urgent. Stand was made with and for a community centre in Oxford, but
– a few site-specific references aside – it isn't unique to that
community, and resonates much further. It speaks to our time, and our
responsibility, a responsibility
given short shrift by those whose interest lies in preventing it. You
can hear the cynicism activism struggles against when the woman
running the community skill-centres says: “You’re collectively
looking after everybody’s needs, so you kind of make a community
and it feels very like – this is going to sound really hippie, but
– it feels very loving.” Everything about anti-capitalism sounds
hippie: naive, idealistic, misguided. Impossible to achieve. The
narrative that says capitalism represents how humans naturally are is
strong: it has to be, to keep us hypnotised by inevitability. Stand
offers a different narrative. This is what we need art to do.
*
At another point during the
intermittently rewarding, frequently frustrating In Battalions
festival, someone remarked that most audience members have no idea
what work goes into making a piece of theatre. Catherine Love wrote a
thoughtful column about this at the start of the year, agreeing that:
“Theatre tends to be notable for the erasure of its own work; we
are invited to partake in illusions, to forget the labour that has
produced what we witness on stage.” I re-read her column last
month, and wondered whether the NPO funding structure justifies itself in that erasure, by paying for what's visible – the upkeep of
buildings, the paperwork of evaluation and accountancy, “office or
utility costs” – while successfully ignoring the invisible work of
the rehearsal room and beyond.
For a couple of days in July, I popped
into Chris' rehearsal room as he worked on Men in the Cities. I've
started yet another Deliq post on that show, so won't say much about
it here, but what struck me – more so than in other CG&Co
rehearsal rooms – was how much work was necessary to transform that
text, which Chris had already spent several months writing, into
performance. Maybe I registered it more because there were so few
people in the room: just Chris, his director Wendy and stage manager
Hattie; sometimes Katherine and Naomi and Ric (lighting, set,
producer) were there too, but the work that riveted and exercised me
was the subtle, intricately detailed work of the voice. Work that is
hidden and patient and essential to communicating with precision;
work that involved argument, negotiation, justification (Wendy's
sensibility is quite different from Chris', and she questions every
choice he makes.) The difference between the first read-through and
the first preview, in terms of where Chris was placing the stress in
individual sentences, where he was modulating his voice to facilitate
empathy or create distance, how he was guiding his audiences'
relationships with his characters, was fascinating, but if I hadn't
been to rehearsals, it would have remained invisible. Not the nuance
itself, but the journey to it.
What does it mean to witness, and
articulate, that work? I wish I knew – not least because this is
the heart of that bloody essay on “embedded” criticism that I'm
still struggling to write. Not least because, if I could find a way
of positioning its value, I might find a way to get paid for it. Not
least because I need a sense of meaning to justify doing this instead
of earning money to support my family, doing this when (the
patriarchal structures of motherhood keep reminding me that) I ought
to be with my family. This isn't me fishing for compliments, from
anyone but least of all from CG&Co, who give me a rare sense of psychic security in the world. It's me seeking a new
language to articulate value and meaning, to myself and to the kids I
so thoughtlessly brought into being, a value that doesn't relate
to money, a meaning that doesn't reduce everything to productive,
quantifiable work. A language that rides a big horse into a big
battle, breathes fire from its eyes, and doesn't play capitalism's
game.
Monday, 21 July 2014
break on through to the other side
I no longer know where this one starts.
It's restarting at 1am on 21 July 2014, with just three days of
school left before the summer holidays. It started 10 days ago,
although I didn't know how to start, and panic set in at the thought
that everything I'd wanted to say had disappeared. It started three
weeks before that, in the midst of work-related despair at the
pointlessness of my existence. That was the week I finally read
Nicholas Ridout's Theatre
& Ethics and for a brief galvanising
interlude felt there was some purpose to this stupid thing I keep
doing. The book is 70 densely argued yet gently repetitive pages
scanning history and philosophical argument that ends with the most
concise and exacting manifesto for theatre criticism I think I've
ever encountered. Theatre isn't at its most ethical, Ridout posits,
when “what the work says or does matches our own sense of what we
would like it to say or do, corresponds with our own sense of how we
would like the world to be”. For theatre to be ethical, it “would
have to confront its spectators or participants with something
radically other, something that could not be assimilated by their
existing understanding of the ethical”. Such work requires “a
labour of critical thought for its ethical potential to be realised”,
requires a critic to approach it “with uncertainty, with a view to
the possibility of surprise, challenge or affront”. The way I read
this, the theatre that's genuinely going to contribute to the shaping
of a more humane, liveable, empathetic society is going to require
the rigorous reading and storytelling of critics. So there's a
reason to sit at the desk every not-so-spare hour of the day.
*
On Tuesday of that week, my friend Jake
saw Christopher Brett Bailey's This Is How We Die and sent me a text
assuring me I would fall apart watching it, in all the best ways. On
Wednesday my twitter friend Megan saw This Is How We Die and tweeted
to make sure I was going to see it because I would love it. On
Thursday I saw This Is How We Die and spent the first 50 minutes
wondering how I would confess to them both that it was good but not
so blam-pow-whizz. And then The Thing happened and my whole body
lurched and my insides felt bigger than my outsides, and I bought a
ticket to see it again on Saturday, because this time – knowing
what was coming – I could watch it with uncertainty. That sounds
paradoxical, I know. It's that kind of show. (From here on, it's all
spoilers. But the show is so full of ideas and images and language
that I'll barely scrape the surface.)
It starts with Bailey sitting at a
desk, a small table rather, small enough to make him look a little
awkward and cramped. It starts with some methodical arranging of the
script piled before him and the glass of water beside it, so that
everything is positioned precisely so. It starts with a cheeky sort
of hangdog half-smile, and then he leans into the microphone and it's
like when a tap is broken and a fountain gushes out uncontrolled.
Except every word is positioned precisely so. This opening speech –
Beckett meets Burroughs – talks about masculinity and sex and
violence and the seep of prison culture into everyday society, about
apocalypse and living hell and the impossible weight of bringing
children into this world, but most of all it talks about words, words
as weapons, words that have lost all their meaning. How do we relate
to each other in a world where language is abused and can't be
trusted any more?
A line I've never forgotten, from the
stapled pages of a typewritten book, hand-made by someone I loved
long ago: “If you take a word out of context, what might it mean?
(MEAN.)”
And then snap: This Is How We Die
becomes a love story, a teen romance, the kind I grew up watching.
Misfits against the world. Qui elevent leurs skinny fists comme
antennas to heaven.
In exquisite detail we follow the couple – Chris and a girl dressed
all in black, immaculate beehive, a mouse, chain-smoking, where her
mouth should be – to her parents' house for Sunday lunch. Her
parents are grotesque, cartoon monsters, but she has described them
to Chris with a surgical accuracy he almost can't fault. “God you
are so literal,” he tells her admiringly. “I love that.”
She gives words meaning. She makes
words mean.
Another shift: the girlfriend upbraids
Chris for his carelessness with language. When you use language like
that, she bristles, [you sound like] a misogynist. The accusation
heralds an electrifying harangue from Chris, against the policing of
thought through labels: that's racist, sexist, misogynist – not
very humanist. Rewind to a line in the first section: PC has gone
mad. Who's using these labels anyway? Are they really an expression
of ethics? Of morality? Or just plain hypocrisy? Let's pause here and
watch Panti
Bliss speaking at the Abbey Theatre again,
talking about oppression and self-hatred. This is the world Chris –
or “Chris” – is wriggling within, in which the homophobic are
victims of homophobia and white people get to tell people of colour
what constitutes racism. It's enough to make your head spin.
Attack the -ism instead of the -ist,
the girlfriend tells Chris. Not the individual but the concept. Smash
the ideology. But it's hard when
the words themselves are so unreliable, slipping and sliding against
each other into contradiction. His only solace is to take everything
she says at face value. Go fuck yourself, the girlfriend tells him.
So he does. Literally.
It's important to
know this about This Is How We Die: its thought, its politics, are
fierce, incendiary, but it's also very funny in places, teasing as
much as testing abuses of language. It's also, for a show so limited
visually, just a man at a table speaking into a microphone, vivid to
the point of lurid excess, as fascinating yet appalling in its colour
as fresh vomit. The more disgusted Chris appears with language, the
more he makes us hang on every word.
That
was truer for me the second time I saw it than the first; in the road
trip episode that comes next, I began to drift – to be honest,
exactly as I would on a long car journey across flat plain lands,
turning inwards, dreaming inconsequentially. Shaking that off in the
second watch, I could appreciate its quiet reflection and troubled
expression. Chris gazes out of the car window and thinks about
America, and the arrogance of humans who think they know everything,
about nature, and death, and what it is – oh god I love this line –
to be “fucked up by static and watched over by satellites”. He
knows he's repeating the moves, the poses, of a hundred indie movies,
the barfly philosophy of almost every Beat or drugs book ever
published, because culture, especially American culture, invades and
absorbs us, and that's what teenagers do (I did, in the back seat of
my auntie's car, driving through mountains in Greece, gazing up at a
new angle on the stars, listening to the Swirlies
and feeling nothing like my family, nothing like people at school).
The lighting, positioned precisely so throughout, expands here into a
long, thin sheet across the stage: it becomes widescreen cinematic,
and so do the images conjured up by Chris' text.
This was also the
point at which I began to marvel at how meticulous the piece is in
construction and argument, and hear how words and lines repeat across
the whole like musical refrains. The first episode begins with an
excoriating delineation of masculinity; the “go fuck yourself”
episode plays with notions of emasculation; the first line rages that
“masculinity is measured in pussy”; on the road trip Chris muses
on the triple meanings of the word pussy, its conflation with
cowardice, and how impossible it is to square that with the bravery
of vaginas. More than once, the couple raise their “fists at the
sky or at God or maybe just the satellites”; on the road Chris is
haunted by the reverberation of an A minor chord in the air;
constantly he is drawn back to thinking about death and meaning and
death and articulacy and death and fear and death.
Is it
really about dying? I'm not sure. I think it's more about what it is
to live without spirituality, on a planet so surrounded by satellites
that it's no longer possible to trust our view of the stars, in which
every mystery of the world can be crammed into a small metal box that
fits in the palm of a hand, and we “cannot picture the future
because we cannot imagine living through the present”. A sentiment
that haunts me, from Kieran Hurley/AJ Taudevin's Chalk
Farm
(annoyingly, I can't quote the line accurately, because I haven't got
the text to hand and, perhaps tellingly, no review I've encountered
mentions it, despite it being, I think, the crux of the play): Why do
we find it so much easier to imagine the end of the world, than more
equal ways of living together? This Is How We Die is saturated in
those visions of apocalypse. We are destroying each other with the
stories we choose to create and share.
If I'm honest,
though, I'm not sure how well I followed Chris' line of argument
around climate change and environmental crisis. For instance, I can't
quite tell if he's being sincere or sarcastic when he says (I think I
got this down right): “I'm so glad there's no concrete proof that
this planet is struggling to support the people alive on it.” It
comes in between his descriptions of humans as an “arrogant hex of
a species” who are “fixated on their own demise”, and before he
suggests “maybe our species and our planet are in their infancy”.
There's another echo here for me, of a brilliant children's book by
Michael Foreman from 1972 called Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish, in
which a single obnoxious businessman who represents the repugnant
entirety of capitalist industry decides the planet he's covered with
factories belching pollution is too ugly to bear, so he flies off in
a rocket to search for a more beautiful place instead. Reaching a
grey, rubbly star on which a single flower grows, he looks across
space and sees a planet glowing sapphire and emerald in the distance:
there, there is his paradise. Of course it's our Earth – but an
Earth where dinosaurs have come back to life, broken up the roads,
destroyed all the factories, and returned the land to verdancy. I
think what Chris is saying is we have the potential to be that place
of beauty again. But society has to change. Radically.
Again, even after a second watch there
was something about the final episode that felt elusive. Chris
transports us in a blink to a gladiatorial amphitheatre in which “we
are humble, we are naked and unafraid”. X In this amphitheatre – and that “theatre” is
part of what confuses me – the tongue is a blade in the mouth, a
weapon, a whip, and again and again we – the we present in the
arena, performing for a baying audience – “declare this language
dead”. But if there is a death here, it is the ritualistic death of
the phoenix, consumed by fire in order to live, brighter and better,
again. Chris declares this language dead, and then – not alone, as
part of a group, and that feels so crucial – he makes a new
language. A language that rips through skin to pummel heart and gut,
a language that bypasses meaning and goes straight for affect, a
language that – like the language of Godspeed You Black Emperor –
speaks plaintively, furiously, of everything that is fucked up in the
world, but shimmers, always, with hope. A language made entirely of
hope.
I keep describing This Is How We Die as
episodic, but in the days and days it's taken me to write this I've
realised it's more musical in structure than that makes it sound.
Initially I thought it was symphonic, each episode or section a
movement. But then I thought, no: it's like an album. Each episode is
a song, and each song has its own mood and atmosphere and distinctive
intensity, and the whole thing ends in extraordinary catharsis. And
then I thought of albums like it, and I realised: Spiderland.
Christopher Brett Bailey has made me theatre's Spiderland. And that,
my friends, is how I die happy.
*
There's been some terrific writing
inspired by This Is How We Die: by
Megan Vaughan, who says of Bailey, “He’s
the taste of cigarettes on a kiss”; by
Catherine Love; and particularly by
Andy Field, who does the inspired thing of
sitting it side by side with Deborah Peason's The Future Show, to
think about theatrical illusion, the visible script as accomplice,
and the blissful release of nothingness. (I disagree with Andy on
that final note: Debbie's release isn't blissful to me, and Chris'
isn't into nothingness.) If This Is How We Die is Spiderland, The
Future Show sits in the space between these two
songs:
Which, because Deerhunter are genius at
(well, everything, but in this particular instance) album sequencing,
is the infinitesimal space between two tracks, which on vinyl is a
silence full of texture, the barely audible static of natural
electricity. A sentence that will mean nothing to an entire
generation. (As an aside, one of these days I'll have to stop
connecting everything I love to Deerhunter and actually write about
why I love this fucking band so fucking much.) But it's also in the
gap between two conjoined sentiments, the metal holding together two
sides of a coin, between:
When you were young
you never knew which way you'd go
what was once grace, now undertows
and:
I don't want to get old
I don't want to get old
I don't want to get old, no
I first saw The Future Show in a
diamantine 20-minute scratch showing in spring 2012; the next time I
saw it, in summer 2013, it was more like an hour long, its basic
premise, its single coruscating idea, unchanged but mined for
everything it is worth. Debbie starts with her final breath in the
performance, and the audience clapping; she describes leaving the
space, chatting in the bar, going home, working the following day,
the quiet rhythms of married life, maybe she gets a cat, maybe a
parcel arrives when she's out, all those tiny inconsequential
incidents that fill up time and make up a life, shaping her possible
future with lapidarian skill, slowly, gently, inexorably as a tide,
working her way to that final breath in the performance that, when it
happens, is devastating. It is full of politics, yet what I remember
of it, the residue of it that sits in my bones, is purely personal.
It is so intimate that every word seems absolutely truthful, although
a fiction, a projection, a fortune read from a palm. It is brave yet
resigned, hopeful yet bleak; however we differ in our details, our
endings are all the same. The best we can do? Measure each step, look
straight ahead, and don't forget to breathe.
*
On the Friday night between my two
run-ins with This Is How We Die I was at Ovalhouse again, for Greg
Wohead's The
Ted Bundy Project. A few months before its
London run I had a lovely chat with Greg, who wanted to pick my
brains about my different experiences of post-show gatherings,
decompression spaces in which audiences could talk about and process
difficult work. (In the end – at least, judging by the Ovalhouse
run – Greg decided not to create such a space. Even so, I had
another little moments of thinking, oh, maybe what I do isn't a total
waste of time after all.) Sure enough, The Ted Bundy Project is hard
to watch – how could a show about a serial killer not be? But
nothing about it feels gratuitous, or anything less than
painstakingly thoughtful. Unlike a really appalling quantity of
culture, it isn't enthralled by violence, but nor does it condemn
that fixation; it simply holds up a mirror and invites its audiences
to see themselves. Whether or not you see that the reflection as
ugly, distorted and brutalised is up to you.
It didn't occur to me, watching it,
that people would find the structure of Greg's show, particularly his
use of repetition, mystifying;
it was a response I encountered at the Dialogue Theatre Club Jake Orr
and I hosted directly afterwards. To me, every idea was expressed
with subtlety but piercing clarity. This is what I saw:
A man, an all-American guy, medium
build, winning smile, in a male equivalent of bridal white: pure,
clean polo shirt and pristine tennis shorts. Doing a camp little
dance to Chirpy
Chirpy Cheep Cheep, the kind of dance that would endear him to
the most conservative of mothers. A man who confesses to sitting in
bed listening to the voice of a serial killer, over and over again;
watching gory videos of murder, necrophilia, cannibalism online, and
reaction videos made by people watching those same videos, a loop of
hypnosis. We're intrigued, too, right? We're intrigued by all that
material hidden there in the dark net, intrigued by the extremities
of existence. Right?
A man, medium build, in pristine tennis
whites, laying out the paraphernalia of Ted Bundy's first murder
while Lou Reed drawls Walk
on the Wild Side. I said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.
There's the sling Bundy wore to attract a woman's sympathy, the
handcuffs he used to restrain her; a wig modelled on a victim's long
brown hair, a handbag, some lipstick.
A man, winning smile, asking a member
of the audience – also male – to join him on stage. He asks the
second man to stand with a sheer stocking over his face, obscuring
his features, his identity. This second man is standing in for Ted
Bundy. Meanwhile, the first man, an all-American guy, in pristine
tennis whites, puts on the wig, the handbag, the lipstick. And while
Hall and Oates' Rich
Girl plays, this young woman, a student, gazes at the face of the
man who will turn out to be her murderer, her lower lip quivering
with the beginning of sexual excitement. She is a rabbit in
headlights, and she doesn't even know it. She is caught, and she
doesn't know it. Because right now she is flattered, and attracted,
and vaguely aware that she shouldn't be doing what she's doing. She's
a rich girl, and she's gone too far, and watching her, Greg as her,
with that song, so vindictive, my stomach clenched and I wanted to
scream: no.
A man, medium build, in pristine tennis
whites, standing with his head inside a sheer stocking, in the same
place that his stand-in for Ted Bundy just stood. He repeats the
opening section of the show. Whose voice is this now? Greg's? Or
Bundy's?
A man, an all-American guy, winning
smile, describing a murder fantasy he once indulged, of killing a
teenage girl who filled him with jealousy, smashing her head until it
turned into pulp.
A man, dancing to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep
Cheep, the kind of dance that would endear him to the most
conservative of mothers, while beside him on a plywood board is the
opening scene of a video that can easily be located via Google, in
which a man attacks another man with an icepick, before dismembering
him, fucking the limbless torso, ripping out chunks of the corpse's
flesh with his teeth, and inviting his dog to do the same. We know
this because the man, this all-American guy with the winning smile,
has described the video to us in detail. Even typing the words I can
feel acid nausea sting in my throat.
And this is what I noticed:
Throughout, Greg is punctilious in
naming Georgeann Hawkins, the murdered woman he chooses to represent
all of Bundy's victims. In this, he distances himself from a
voyeuristic tabloid culture that, for instance, no less consistently
refers to Reeva Steenkamp as the girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius. And
demonstrates an awareness of and sympathy with the Everyday
Sexism campaign.
An awareness of and sympathy with 1970s
feminist thought – contemporaneous with the deaths of a still
unknown number of women at the hands of Ted Bundy – particularly
(to quote my new favourite feminist, Sarah
Ditum) Andrea Dworkin's “disturbing
insights into the way patriarchy distorts the
act of sex into an act of violence by which men assert their
possession of women”.
The bravery of Greg's willingness to
identify himself with Ted Bundy. In that business with the stocking,
Greg admits that his own charming surface might not be so different
from Bundy's, that he could be just like Bundy, because he lives
within a social system – a patriarchal system – that is
inherently misogynistic, in which “rape culture” is actually a
thing, and in which popular culture does everything it can to support
that system by fixating on the violent deaths of women in TV and
cinema and literature, filling music videos with semi-naked women,
using female objectification as a marketing tool, representing rape
as a woman's fault, using topless women to sell newspapers, and on
and on and on.
How visceral the fear of rape is in me.
It dates back to school days, when I was given my first rape alarm in
sex education lessons, and read Helen
Zahavi's Dirty Weekend, a book in which a woman
“conquers her fear and transforms herself from victim to avenger”:
far from empowering me, it introduced me to realms of sexual violence
I hadn't by that point imagined for myself, and that frighten me
still. There is an extraordinary
blog post by the playwright Katherine Mitchell
delineating how this fear, inculcated in young women from the
earliest possible age, can affect how they comport themselves for the
rest of their lives, how an accumulation of experience of everyday
sexism can affect their confidence and their sense of even having a
voice. I felt almost dizzy when I read that blog post, from gratitude
that someone had articulated this filthy secret buried deep inside
me. A few weeks before seeing Greg's show, I went to Soho Theatre for
Adrienne Truscott's Asking
For It – subtitled “A one-lady rape about
comedy starring her pussy and little else” – and had a similar
experience. Truscott spends most of the show's running time wearing a
tight-fitting dress split to reveal her pubic hair; she starts it
downing cans of G&T; she does headstands and projects the faces
of sexist men on her torso, allowing them to print themselves on her
body. She is the very definition of asking for it. And while she does
all this she mercilessly satirises men who espouse misogyny, picking
at every loose thread of anti-abortion arguments and sexist politics
and representations of rape in popular culture until it feels as
though the whole world has unravelled. Her strip-tease is so mocking
it made me cry with laughter; her run through common rape-prevention
tips – pointing out how they're essentially designed to stop women
ever feeling at ease as they have fun – is so contemptuous that it
made me laugh with crying. Around this time, I came across the list
of 10 things
men can do to prevent rape (“9. Carry a rape
whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the
whistle until someone comes to stop you.”), and that, too, was a
balm to my soul.
In The Ted Bundy Project, Greg Wohead
accepts responsibility for that fear, that violence, that everyday
sexism.
The Ted Bundy Project “confront[s]
its spectators or participants with something radically other,
something that could not be assimilated by their existing
understanding of the ethical. It … issue[s] a demand they [do] not
know how to answer.” To skip a few pages back in Nicholas Ridout's
Theatre & Ethics, it puts its audience “face to face with the
other, in a recognition of our mutual vulnerability which encourages
relationships based on openness, dialogue and a respect for
difference”. I don't think for a moment Greg is asking his audience
to respect Ted Bundy, or his actions. But he is asking that we
empathise, with the man committing the violence, and the woman
experiencing it. He is asking us to recognise, name
and face up to this violence, so that, instead of allowing it to be
perpetuated within a conspiracy of silence, we can work together –
through openness and dialogue – to change the social systems in
which it can flourish.
Friday, 18 July 2014
See my friends
Among all the other things – plotting
out a Dialogue residency at Forest
Fringe during the Edinburgh festival and a London event for
November; catching up on a heap of writing for here (for reasons I
can't possibly explain, this is one of four posts I'm compiling
simultaneously); getting back into gear with Fuel's New
Theatre in Your Neighbourhood project – and with the children's
summer holiday about to land on me like an upright piano from a
fourth-floor window, I'm trying to write my entry for an anthology of
essays on theatre criticism being curated and edited by the
redoubtable Duska
Radosavljevic. It's on what mostly gets called “embedded
criticism”, although I hope by the end of it to have come up
with an equally catchy and user-friendly alternative term (unlikely);
it's been on the cards since well before last Christmas, which
obviously means I did nothing for months, started panicking at the
beginning of June, then at the start of July vomited out a rough
sketch of the entire thing, with a rapidity that could only mean that
it was compiling itself in my subconscious while I slept. No wonder I
kept waking up feeling exhausted. X For the Duska essay I'm also thinking through
my various experiences of critic-as-almost-dramaturg or
critic-as-outside-ear or just critic-as-fellow-traveller with Peter
McMaster and Andy Field,
wondering what, if anything, I bring to either of them at the
periphery of a making process. Right now, having not seen either of
them for weeks, I haven't a clue: in those bits of the text, in big
letters, all I've written is “ask Peter?” and “ask Andy?”.
The fuzziness is partly in the blurring
of work into friendship, especially with Peter, who very quickly
became one of the people I love most in the world, one of the rare
people to whom I can confess all the secret thoughts that prickle
inside, malevolent genies kept tight-sealed in bottles because if I
unleashed them they would wreak devastation. Peter makes it possible
to talk about the difficult things, the dangerous things. What he
does personally, he aims to do politically, and in doing so work
towards a redefinition of masculinity. We've talked often and fruitfully about how important it is to him not to sit back and
expect feminism to sort the world out, but to gather with men
to dismantle the patriarchal conception of masculinity, strip it of
aggression, lay
down its arms. How important it is for men to
gather and talk about the violence of masculinity and patriarchal
expectation, the way riot grrrl created safe spaces for women to
gather and talk about how that violence expresses itself against
them, physically and psychologically. His report
on the retreat he organised as part of LADA's DIY programme last year
is a beautiful record of his attempt to build such a space,
questioning, fragile and loving.
He made another of those spaces in
Wuthering
Heights, the all-male confabulation with Emily Bronte's novel
that sent me reeling when I saw it in November
last year. I saw it again in Bristol at this year's Mayfest,
and am already lining up to see it again in Edinburgh, trying really
hard not to feel embarrassed by the assumptions people, friends,
might make about me seeing a show repeatedly in which this person I
adore appears naked. I wrote a fair bit about WH last year, because I
wanted to remember it, remember all its hurt and anger and hope, and
seeing it again was discombobulating, because it wasn't quite what
I'd remembered and I kept fretting that I'd misrepresented it. But
no: that first bit of writing sketched where WH was. It's travelled
somewhere else since then.
That's partly to do with a cast change:
Thom Scullion, who represented Heathcliff in last year's WH, has been
replaced by Gary Gardiner, whose height – he's much taller, which
makes him seem more imposing – and wiry physique, plus the fact
that he's already a father to three children, creates a completely
different energy on stage. I missed Thom, his gentle demeanour, but I
think the show is probably stronger with Gary. Or maybe that new
strongness is coming from somewhere else. From inside Peter himself.
It turned out I saw WH on a difficult
night: it was their first of three Mayfest performances, the lighting
rig wasn't in place at the venue when they arrived, they finished
teching about 20 minutes before they were supposed to start, and so
didn't have a run-through, let alone proper time to prepare. Peter
told me afterwards the show ran a good quarter-hour shorter than it
was supposed to because they forgot to do a bunch of stuff. So the
sense of it being less diffuse, more direct and focused and certain
than it was in November, could be accidental and false. But I'm
pretty sure there's been a shift in emphasis, from a group of men
struggling within the imagery of Wuthering Heights to figure out who
they are and might be, to a group of men retelling the story of
Wuthering Heights, and in doing so more confidently confronting an
old idea of masculinity with the possibility of a new.
That means some of the more personal
material has been shed: notably the section in which they look into
the future, some of them thinking about children and what it might be
to become a father. Gone, too, is the long coughing fit that I read
as an expectoration of masculinity's malignancy from within. There's
a sharper sense now of the horse, played by Nick Anderson, not just
framing the narrative but shaping it from his perspective,
simultaneously communicating incomprehension of and subjection to the
vicissitudes of men. I feel like they spent more time in character in
Bristol, less time scratching against their own skins. It made the
questions section – when Peter, still dressed as Cathy's maid
Nelly, stands before Heathcliff and unleashes a torrent of questions
about fear, sexuality, violence, desire, and more, that lacerates his
throat as it scours the air – no less powerful but more bearable:
in November it stabbed inwards, in May it felt thrown outwards.
The biggest change, though, is in the
inclusion of an extraordinary scene in which Nelly grooms the horse
while Heathcliff and Cathy engage in a battle of wills. Gary's
Heathcliff, an iron coil of aggression, paces after Murray Wason's
Cathy, round and round the space enclosed by the audience's seats,
cajoling her, luring her, taunting her, berating her. Cathy refuses
all of it. He grabs at her, Cathy resists, tugs at her, Cathy
wriggles free. He tears at her dress but Cathy doesn't care. She
keeps walking, walking away from him, Heathcliff following, fighting
to impose his will, Cathy rejecting, fighting back, until eventually
Cathy is naked and the two of them are wrestling and still, still,
Cathy won't give in. Meanwhile Peter's Nelly sits on the arched back
of Nick's horse, combing his hair and feeding him an apple with a
love and solicitude that are heart-rending. The contrast, of demand
and offer, of brutality and tenderness, was electric. Watching
Heathcliff grapple with a resistant, naked Cathy, I realised I was
impulsively holding my breath, and suddenly my head was filled with
this song:
I can't breathe with you looking at
me. It was weird, being flooded by that song at that moment,
because for months and months now, the music of Deerhunter has been
the safest place I know, the place I go when I feel most
alone. There was an odd sort of loneliness in the WH room that night: the audience around me seemed resistant, and I felt my distance from them acutely. But it was also weird because that song is dedicated to Jimmy
Lee Lindsey Jr, better known as Matador musician Jay Reatard, who
killed himself early in 2010. And it's a song about frustration, and
furious isolation, and violent inner struggle, and what it is to be a
man and live with the history and imagery of being a man. There's a
beautiful bit of writing about it online, by Matthew
Perpetua (such a great name):
I don’t like the word friend very
much. Its meaning has been devalued by our culture... The classic
values of friendship – of close friendship – are very important
to me. I just wish we used better, more precise words to do justice
to these kinds of relationships. … “Friend” is the word that
rings out most in “He Would Have Laughed,” the final song on
Deerhunter’s new album. “I know where my friends are now,”
“Where did my friends go?,” “Where do your friends go?” These
lines cut to the emotional core of the piece – loneliness,
confusion, the self-defeating isolation of someone who keeps everyone
at a distance. The song was written in memory of Jay Reatard, who was
by most accounts a rather difficult and angry guy. I hear the song as
being about the loss of a frustrating person, the kind who shuts you
out, rejects your sentimentality, and behaves like an asshole. The
kind of person you love and respect in spite of themselves, or how
they treat you. I don’t hear judgment, or even grief in this music.
All I hear is empathy and kindness.
He's kind of describing Heathcliff
there, right? And those are the qualities that glow at the heart of
Wuthering Heights: empathy and kindness.
Maybe it was the boldness of this
scene, the clarity of its direction, that made me think the show is
stronger now, and Peter stronger to have been able to make it. And
this is what makes me excited about seeing WH again in Edinburgh: the
idea that in the three months between, they might have found new ways
to make it more impactful still.
*
This is the big change I've noticed in
my theatre-going since beginning to take the process-not-product
approach that I'm attempting to articulate in the Duska essay: I make
the effort now to see work more than once, at multiple stages of
development. I thought that was mostly commitment-related: X working with
Fuel hosting post-show Theatre Clubs as part of NTiYN, of course I'd
see shows in many venues. (By the end of my stint with Glen
Neath/David Rosenberg's Ring,
I'd seen it – if you can call it that when a show is staged in the
darkest, most Stygian, viscous-black dark possible in a theatre –
four
times. The first time, that dark made me unbalanced and nauseous;
the fourth, giddy and gleeful.) But it's not just work: apparently
this is now what I do for fun. My husband and children despair.
I wouldn't do it, I suppose, if returns
diminished, but almost everything improves on further viewing.
Admittedly, I think I concentrate harder if I make the decision to go back. But also, work grows.
Clout's Various Lives of
Infinite Nullity was blissful to see again: when they performed it in
Edinburgh in 2013, it did a lot of smart and intriguing things
creating purgatorial scenes in which green-skinned children scraped
the blood off of corpses and gorged it spread on bread like jam, and
people who had committed suicide gathered for a regular coffee
morning, polite chit-chat gradually escalating into a competition
over who had died most gruesomely, and for the most politically acute
reason. But by the time I caught it again, at the Incoming
festival in May 2014, what had been a sketch had transformed into
a cohesive, starkly funny, profoundly disturbing show. The scenes
were much the same, but sharper, fiercer, pushed as far as they could
go; the children were genuinely intimidating, the suicides more
strange and unsettling. The company were raising tricksome
questions of what constitutes depravity, what constitutes sin, and
who gets to decide the limits of acceptability; what freedoms might
be found in death, and what impulse towards suicide crackles beneath
the surface of everyday life. The point that western capitalism is
killing people was made both more stridently and more subtly. But the
company had also created new, more abstract material that had many in
the audience (me included) jangling, it was so incomprehensible, extreme – and amusing. I've just read Matt
Trueman's review of the Edinburgh show, which he enjoyed, but
with reservations: “The problem is that their images remain just
that: images. Too few translate into a visceral experience and spread
the gnawing sensation they aim to convey into the stalls. In other
words, Clout theatre describe a feeling without magicing it into
existence. To do that, one needs still less literalism, to ramp up
the inexplicable horror and detach from anything remotely rational.”
That sense of the inexplicable and not remotely rational was exactly
what I felt I was encountering in the Incoming performance. The
company's work on the show still isn't done: they have another
rehearsal week to play with it before a short run at BAC in the
autumn. I'm really looking forward to seeing it again.
It's a constant nagging frustration
that Jake and I haven't found time yet to document our residency at
BAC's Scratch festival in June 2013, which is where I first
encountered Clout: privately in rehearsal rooms and publicly in
all-comers-welcome conversations in the cafe, we talked a lot during that month about the benefits and limitations of
scratch and work-in-progress frameworks; the ways in which they
benefit makers, but also entrench them within a limited and
generalised offer; the ways in which makers successfully mould
scratch to suit their own practice; and ideas makers have for how to
make the system better, less of a showcase or a competition, less
exploitative, less potentially damaging. For years, I didn't go to
scratch showings, because I didn't understand my interaction with
them: I still don't like feedback forms, and I was too shy to take up
the invitation to talk to makers in the bar afterwards. I go now
because I like to see work that is fragile and unformed: I'm
constantly aware of my responsibility as an audience member (or
audience practitioner, in the brilliant phrase coined by a lovely
Canadian woman after she attended a panel where Andy
Horwitz and I spoke about new forms of criticism, which I keep
using in the hope it becomes common currency), the responsibility to
be curious and attentive and responsive – but this feels weightier,
or at least more material, in a scratch setting. In March 2013, at a
panel
event discussing scratch hosted by getinthebackofthevan, Mamoru
Iriguchi spoke insightfully about what he gets out of such
performances: he doesn't find feedback forms a helpful interaction
either, but he does listen carefully to his audience while he's
performing, notice where their attention lands and where it drifts,
where they respond and how.
Where this becomes complicated is when
a show travels from a scratch in a direction you, as loyal audience,
weren't anticipating: when your ability to see what the show has
become is impaired by the crowding of your sight with ghosts, of what
the show used to or promised to be. This happened to me with Andy
Field and Ira Brand's Put
Your Sweet Hand in Mine, which I'm trying to write about in the
Duska essay: that
experience made me think a lot about trust in an
“embedded”-or-whatever-we're-calling-it criticism
relationship, what happens when “embedded” and dramaturgy blur, and where open-mindedness sits in
critique. But this is material for the Duska essay, not here.
I'm here because I've been wrestling with a single paragraph in it
for two sodding days now, getting nowhere. Time to go back and
see if it's finally written itself.
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