The Catastrophe Trilogy

What happens when you tell a story? What do stories do, in theatre and in our lives? The Catastrophe Trilogy - Alice Bell (2006), Daniel Hit By A Train (2008), and The Festival (2010) - are some kind of an answer. They are the flowering of Lone Twin Theatre, a step away from Lone Twin’s more purely performance and conceptual work and a step towards theatre, or at least towards an engagement with narrative and character. The first and third shows follow singular stories; the middle show presents us with 53 capsule narratives, stories on the edge being story.

It’s a beautiful trio of shows, each one having its own distinctive identity and theatrical language, but with pulses and echoes that ripple across all three. The catastrophes are so different in each show that I wondered whether the title wasn’t a sly joke about the pompous tradition of the playwriterly trilogy (Wesker, Hare, et al.). I strained to find a catastrophe in The Festival (is a missed opportunity catastrophic?) and Daniel Hit By A Train asks rather profound questions about the meaning and possibility of representing catastrophe. Each show is punctuated by songs, often accompanied on the ukulele, and the whole trilogy has a popular-theatre energy.

Alice Bell tells the story of a young woman living in a country divided by a civil war. She is sent away to boarding school but she runs away. She is standing on a bridge when it is bombed by the rebel army but rescued by the bomber. Since Alice is believed to be dead, she changes her name to Clara Day but her identity is revealed when a schoolfriend sees her in the street. She is forced to carry a bomb into town and while she yells at everyone to get out of her way, she is killed in the explosion.

To give the story of this show is partly to miss the point, though. It does have a narrative but it’s also asking questions about narrative, the way that narrative organises a theatrical encounter, the tension between the over-arching narrative and the micronarrative encounters that punctuate our daily lives. The dramaturgy of the show disrupts some of the features of that narrative arc; some features of the story (and of the show) are given to us at the beginning, both in Alice’s early monologue and a strange moment where her brother gets visions of her future (including her singing a country and western song). Soon after Alice becomes Clara, the show hurriedly tells us about her unmasking in an eerie flashforward, moving this narrative turning point ahead of its chronological sequence; the whole story is then recapitulated up to her death in a rousing country and western song played on ukuleles. These have an effect of suppressing our breathless engagement with the twists and turns of the story, while still presenting the story to us as an object to be observed, handled, tested.

There are references to Oxford Street and Denmark Street which would seem to place the action in London, though the civil war and the reference to the bombed bridge suggested to me the old bridge in Mostar, destroyed by Croatian bombardment in 1993. In fact, these accidents of place and time don’t seem especially significant to these stories; time and place were picked up and discarded as required. The bridge in Mostar was a graceful arc and its destruction seemed a resonant echo of the show’s bombardment of its own narrative arc, the fragments of Alice’s story coming apart gracefully under fire.

The show was purposeful fragmented, sections of the story delivered in distinct stylistic sequences. Nicholas - the rebel leader - was introduced as a man who will harm you and he’s given a virtuoso, and very funny, speech where he lists the various people and things he will harm, from Ringo Starr to Eskimos (‘Eskimos, you can run but you can’t hide,’ he warned). Alice’s transformation in Clara Day was effected in a brilliant sequence where Patrick, her lover, trains her to answer questions according to her new personality, the two of them on either side of a table, which danced slowly down the length of the traverse, marking her slow progress from one identity to another. Physical sequences - performers pretending to be dogs, a schoolgirl’s trick with her arms, Alice’s hobbies - were sharp and witty, not difficult, just expressive and smart; sometimes they had emotional pull, as when we see Alice and Patrick’s relationship in him bending forward, supporting Alice who lies sideways across his back.

Daniel Hit By A Train is inspired by the 53 plaques in Postman’s Park in the City of London, commemorating acts of impetuous, doomed courage. Each story is told, usually with the same minimalism as the plaque. The stories begin to collide with each other as the performance goes on some stories told at greater length, the acts seeming sometimes brave, often foolhardy, occasionally comic, often meaningless.

Here narrative is offered in its most minuscule form as fact. We are given bare information: a name, an act - ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’ - followed by some tiny physical performance of that act. Often these physical performances are provocatively inarticulate. ‘Here’s me aged 8,’ announces Guy Dartnell taking on the persona of another of our doomed heroes; we watch as he stands doing nothing.

Nothing is what this show is composed of. We know next to nothing about these lives and the company don’t seem to have found out any more. There is no real effort of impersonation. The stage is bare - a sheet of red vinyl, a door frame. Yet, we’re constantly invited to look at things: ‘Here’s me’ say the performers one after another. ‘This is...’ says Paul Gazzola, the ringmaster, introducing his characters, also asking us to ‘regard the drum’ that’s he’s wearing, to ‘regard its power’ as if this power were visible, to regard the burning house, the runaway horse, the sinking ship and all the other unseen forces of late-Victorian destruction. The remnants on Victorian popular culture - bit of melodrama, a fair bit of circus, a lot of music hall - strained through more contemporary pop culture (I was continually and pleasurably reminded of Vic Reeves' Big Night Out) remind us that in a way this is all theatre, which creates vast offstage - and sometimes onstage - worlds with a word or a gesture.

After each mini-performance, the actors gaze steadily at us; it’s a flat look, not inviting, not challenging, not really engaging. It holds out looking as an object to be observed. This whole show is looking at looking.

Because somehow these stories compel us to fill them out. Knowing nothing but the headline, we seem to invest in these stories, flooding the nothing with our own sentiments. And it is sentiments that the show deals in initially, ripe old Victorian sentiments, as in the song ‘Hey Mamma, Me Solomon’ telling the tale of a boy who ‘saved my brother but I could not save myself’. I was struck that the musical language was definitely pre-1920s, from the era before recording, when popular songs had to be instantly memorable, strong melodies, insistent rhythms. To couple these horrible deaths with such nagging jingles is a moral challenge, but the show wants to know why it’s so easy to tell stories, why we so easily want to weep for ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’.

This all comes to a head in the (repeated?) representation of a girl who doesn’t want to be saved. (Perhaps the ‘lunatic woman’ at Woolwich Station that Frederick Alfred Croft saved at the cost of his own life.) The entire structure of sentiments - bravery, heroism, failure, saved, help, sacrifice - collapses if there’s someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Is this all just sentiment then? Perhaps, but then it’s also utopian in some way. In a funny but emotional sequence, two-thirds of the way in, Guy Dartnell is a would-be Samaritan, running desperately between rival claimants to his aid, in a frenzied desire to save everybody. (Remember the final episode of series 1 of the new Dr Who when Russell T Davies had Rose absorb the power of the Tardis and come back to bring everyone back to life - ‘everybody lives’ she said, her eyes shining like a god.) The celebration of this heroism is an affirmation of mortality, as if death can be avoided; it can’t, of course, as this show both makes clear and laments.

The Festival follows Jennifer who goes to a music festival at Crescent Point, a place where as a child she was taken, unwillingly, to watch migrating schools of humpbacked whales. This time she fleetingly meets an older man and they agree to meet there next year. She spends the year thinking about this man but doing so has so changed her that when they meet again, she doesn’t wish to take their friendship any further.

This is a step much closer to conventional theatre. There’s even some acting, not all of it ironized or placed in quotation marks. There’s interior psychological space and a sort of set (chairs and tables). This is all deceptive, of course, because in a different way from the first two shows, this too is exploring performance. First, while the story is a good one and holds a certain narrative interest, much of the acting isn’t in any sense naturalistic (the scene in which Jennifer’s mother, a secret smoker, deflects her daughter from coming down to the bottom of the garden is conveyed by Nina Tecklenburg, hopping from foot to foot, percussively delivering her lines between exhalations). Second, there are devices - like omniscient narration, non-realist physical sequences - that partake of different performance traditions. And third, probably the most exhilaratingly memorable moments are where the ensemble recreate the improbable headliners at the music festival: we get U2 singing ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’. Elsewhere there’s a snatch of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ ‘By The Way’, a recreation that cannot in any sense be ‘realistic’, since it calls attention to the iconic non-presence of these rock stars.

Also, the dialogue is often perfunctory, knowingly empty, entirely generic and lacking in content. Friends talking in a cafe, executives at Nokia, parents dragging a child on holiday, lab technicians, the situations are carefully presented to give us only what we knew already and not to individualise: ‘I could run upstairs and get the figures,’ offers a Nokia employee. ‘From all accounts I think we’re pretty much exactly where we should be,’ comes a reply both drained of specificity and archly commenting on the precise conventionality of the response.

But also at work within the story is a story about acting. Jennifer spends the year between Festivals thinking of Oliver, a man she barely knows, just as we barely know Jennifer (and barely knew the doomed heroes of Postman’s Park) and this in turn triggers reflections on herself, just as, in imaginative engagement with these fictions, our own performances and fantasies are engaged. Once again, the mystery - if that’s not to strong a word - of acting and theatre-watching assert themselves in a picture of a life changed entirely by a quasi-theatrical engagement with quasi-fiction.

And again there’s something utopian about the affirmation, the way we can connect so simply an immediately with people who don’t exist - and with the actors who do. There’s a long physical sequence 40 minutes in, which the actors perform to exhaustion. It’s hard to watch partly because it asks questions about the limits of watching, marks plainly that we are in the same space with similar responsibilities to each other. It makes thick and bright the connections we are making in the room. And then there are the songs; cheesy, over-familiar maybe, but sung with enormous enjoyment, and collective enjoyment - a picture of friends singing together, the communitas overwhelming any fastidious distaste you might have for U2, or the boredom triggered like a smoke alarm by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And this underscores the sentiment expressed through this show - and, one remembers, throughout the trilogy - of a simple, unadorned, unironic wish that everyone will be okay.

The show reminds me hugely of Suspect Culture’s Timeless, one of the landmark shows in my life, though I’m sure entirely unknown to Lone Twin. University friends meeting after several years, trying to recapture the excitement of a night where they all went to the beach and lit a fire and ate pakoras, their awkwardness and their yearning, their regret and longing, the wish for the things they could say expressed in beautiful words, but also in song and gesture.

What rich, beautiful work.