The Theatre Machine

On the stage of the Olivier on Friday, I interviewed Bijan Sheibani, the director of the National’s revival of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, a play which famously places a working restaurant kitchen on stage for two services, the stage a blaze of sweat, steam, and sizzle. Bijan’s a very interesting, thoughtful interviewee and I was very struck by one of his comments. And somewhere in that conversation, Bijan said he had been interested in whether “the theatre machine had something to say to the kitchen machine”.

The pairing - both of the phrases and within the phrases - is very provocative. Wesker’s play is very ambivalent about his kitchen. Much of the play is directed at the thought that the kitchen is a kind of brutalising, dehumanising factory: a production line for food, in which the staff are exhausted, their imaginations starved, their share of life’s goodness reduced to a wage. On the other hand, the play seems to marvel at the persistent unity and community of these people, the way we can and do work together, despite the pressures, forming friendships, alliances, partnerships of all kinds. ‘This is the United Nations’ says one character, and this must be one of the first plays to reflect what we would now call multicultural Britain: Greeks, Germans, French, Jews, Blacks, Irish are in the 30-strong cast of characters.

And the theatre has a similar ambivalence. At times you can shudder at the way it sucks in actors and spits them out, the near-identical nightly performances, the movements in their way as rigidly enforced as anything in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s manuals of scientific management. But at other times, say in the hours before a dress rehearsal - with one person adjusting a light up a ladder, actors in the stalls going over lines, director in intense conversation, carpenters adjusting the set - it can feel like the most kind of utopian socialism: a huge number of disparate individuals melded into a collective by complementary responsibilities and a sense of common endeavour.

But machine is an ambivalent word isn’t it? Think of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, where Richard Roma calls Shelley Levene ‘The Machine’. He’s meaning someone of power and effect but, applied actually to the work-broken, exhausted and desperate Shelley, it emphasises only his soullessness of his worn-out routine. Machine also implies the mechanistic and will-less. To call the theatre a machine is to throw into question its liveness, its responsiveness to the here and now, those things we often prize.

The Kitchen tests this. The final sequence of the first act is the lunchtime service which is a blur of waitresses spiralling into the kitchen with orders, chefs at their stations serving up food, words and food and plates flying, the supply and the demand pushed to breaking point. To perform this exhilarating (and also, of course, horrifying) scene requires a level of mechanical repetition - like someone performing a high-speed patter song in a musical (you don’t have time to recall the words to ‘Ya Got Trouble’ or ‘Not Getting Married’, you just repeat them) - and the whole scene must be staged like a military operation.

Does this impinge upon those things we value about theatre, as I’ve suggested? I remember when drum machines came in big time in the 1980s and were much criticised by music fans of a certain stamp because the rhythm was too regular, too predictable. As if you want a drummer to suddenly vary the rhythm without warning, to change time signature on whim. The point of a drummer is to be predictable, just as you want a kitchen to produce food of precisely the same high standard and of the same kind each time. And perhaps, just like a kitchen, when you go to the theatre you expect the same thing up the the same standard served up for you.

But but but. The same thing? It must depend. Those people who go to see Les Miserables hundreds of times are presumably a bit like those people who watch Star Wars hundreds of times; up to a point you can keep noticing new things, but ultimately it’s going back to have the same experience. And you can with a production-line production like a megamusical. But when I’ve returned to a production - certainly when I’ve gone to see a new production of a play - I’m going to find new things and to see how different it can be. Yeah, there are limits; if the actors get together backstage and decide, just for one night, that they’ll do a completely different play altogether, I might be a bit startled. On the whole, it’s finding the differences in the same that I want.

Here is one of the ways that the theatre thinks philosophically. Because in that fine balance between difference and the same, mechanical repetition and live spontaneity, there seems to me a dialogue unfolding between a mechanistic universe and a world where free will is possible. The Kitchen is a play haunted by this question: can the world be other than it is? At the end of the play the restaurant owner, Marengo, declares: ‘I give work, I pay well, yes?’ and demands ‘what is there more? What is there more?’ It’s one of the classic lines of the period, similar to its contemporary, The Entertainer, which asks ‘why should I care?’ and similarly hopes we can infer an answer that the speaker cannot. And yet, The Kitchen shows us a lot of people who can’t imagine beyond the limits of the world that they are in. The beginning of the second half has a few of the cooks erecting an improvised arch and Peter asks them to tell him their ultimate dreams. Strikingly most of them find it hard to answer the question and one of them tells only a nightmare of blood and butchery. While the final stage direction of the play answers Marengo’s question with the po-faced answer: ‘we have seen that there must be something more’ the play actually seems haunted by the thought that there isn’t. Is this it? Is this the world?

Bijan puts the theatre machine at the service of this question. The end of the first act trips lightly into absurdism and surrealism, with waitresses flying above the action, suggesting that we are sitting only on a rational shell which might split open and yield quite different worlds of imagination and fancy. And yet the stage design repeatedly reminded me of an orrery - pictured below - a mechanical, clockwork model of the universe that emphasises regularity, predictability, the remorseless execution of physical laws.

This image itself looks a bit like the Olivier, which, based on a Greek amphitheatre, is perhaps an attempt to create a stage that models the universe. Philosophically - and The Kitchen pushes this to the edge - is the theatre machine a model of a mechanical or a free universe?

An orrery made by Benjamin Martin in London in 1767, currently on display at the Putnam Gallery in the Harvard Science Centre