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.
