Hearing Voices

According to a lovely Diary piece in the London Review of Books by Keith Thomas, the historian G M Young described his method as reading until you can hear the people talking. I can recognise that; writing my thesis, I read so much written in the 1940s and 1950s, I felt I could pastiche the style with ease, so vivid was that slightly removed use of language, its adjusted vocabulary, its particular locutions.

I’m currently writing about British theatre in the 2000s. This presents a very different challenge for the historian because I don’t need to hear the voices, because I have heard the voices; I lived through the decade and heard them every day.

Of course, what I need to do is cut through the noise and grasp what is distinctive about the voice of the 2000s. This is to provide a context for thinking about the theatre, specifically the playwriting, of the decade.

Ironically, though, I can think of no better way of hearing the distinctive voice of a decade - that slightly removed use of language, its adjusted vocabulary, its particular locutions - than by reading its plays. The great playwrights of the era capture something about the language and attitudes of the time, estranged and pared down in a way that makes us suddenly aware of our particularity.

Needless to say, going to the plays to understand the context for the plays may generate a certain circularity of critical perspective...

Best Before

I love the idea of Rimini Protokoll, the German theatre company who have dispensed almost entirely with trained actors and use, instead, experts: people who talk about their own expertise, whether that’s as a journalist, lorry driver, call centre operator. Their shows strive to remove the fiction from theatricality, perhaps, in part, to see what irreducible fictionality inhabits the basic relations of theatrical production. They are intrigued by exploring how interesting it is just having knowledgeable people telling you what they know, the interplay between objective knowledge and subjective experience, the sense that the acquiring of knowledge and understanding is part of a life lived, variously and not without affect, desire and defeat.

The subject and form of Best Before is the virtual world: computer gaming, online avatars, Second Life, the Sims. The five main people on stage are a computer programmer, a game tester, a guy who works judging what age rating to give computer games, a flagger (that is, a woman who redirects traffic around construction works - in her case, near the Vancouver offices in which the other two work) and a mysterious cowboy figure who plays country-folk guitar through most of the show. After about fifteen minutes we are introduced to the game. Each of us has a games controller and a small onscreen avatar, like a squidgy, two-colour pebble. We make some decisions about our avatars - whether they study or play games, whether they are militaristic or pacifist, their attitudes to drugs and immigration - and slowly we build up a personality with which we face obstacles, seize opportunities, and slowly grow through life from birth to age 100. This game is interspersed with personal recollections and sarcastic commentary from the experts on stage, who compare our responses with those in other cities where this show has toured.

It’s not just trained actors that Rimini Protokoll seek to do without; obviously, they have no need for the playwright. This interests me, in part because playwrights have been shedding parts of the playwriting role; using found text, leaving gaps for collaborators to finish the play, and so on. It’s a process that brings somewhat experimental writers like Crimp, Ravenhill, Kane and Stephens together with Verbatim theatre and Rimini Protokoll’s brand of ‘Theater der Zeit’. Despite rumour, playwrights aren’t the only people who handle dramaturgy (though I think playwrights are, or should be, very good at that), so I watched this, somewhat perversely, looking at the dramaturgy of the event.

What do I mean by dramaturgy? Heck, not sure. I think I mean a satisfying design and organisation of a theatrical experience through time. So it’s not about the acting as such, or stage design; it’s about narrative in its broadest sense. But of course acting and stage design will sometimes contribute to the temporal experience. I’m not laying down the law here.

The shape is given by the journey of a life - or rather of all our virtual lives as played out on screen. And the work of the show is to allow us to invest emotionally in the blobs on screen. This is does sneakily but effectively through mapping the questions into the conventional sequence of a life (drugs and sex early on, political commitments, career, then family and home, old age and death). I watched the show with Lilla, my lovely wife, who comically took the whole thing very seriously (was very shocked when I decided my avatar wanted to take heroin; was very anxious that we should ‘bond’ as soon as possible and made it very clear that a divorce would not go down well). As a result, I got that feedback where I wasn’t just thinking about myself but found myself moved to watch me and Lilla growing old together, knowing that Lilla beside me was thinking about that too, feeding imaginatively, sympathetically and associatively off one another’s feelings.

One of the things that happens in other shows by Rimini Protokoll that they have talked about is that the experts become actors. That is, they start being interesting because they are awkward and unvarnished, but through dint of repetition and, to some measure, the lure of performance, they start to sharpen up their act - stories get polished, jokes get refined, they start to develop a rapport with the audience. In this show, it was Duff, the games tester, who was most ‘guilty’ of that. (I say guilty, but RP’s attitude is that watching that happen is as interesting as stage 1.) He had developed a series of sardonic put-downs, which were actually a little harsh for the occasion and just every so often a little uncomfortable (he outed the computer programmer as an advocate of the death penalty, oddly, and the moment froze awkwardly on stage. The flagger was nicely ungainly and straightforward in her performance; the programmer had a teutonic lack of affect, which worked. The age-rater (must be a better term) was more confident but was unflashily so.

What we were confronted with in the very rudimentary nature of the screen world was something about our ability to invest very primitive imagery with significance and emotion. As such it stimulated a good deal of thinking about the nature of our mutual engagements on the virtual world. This was paralleled with the stories of the experts, discussing, for example, their experiences of politics, or life-changing decisions which sat alongside their more inaccessible computer expertise.

Quite honestly, as a piece of performance, I felt the device had diminishing returns. The old age period was quite moving, but that was almost two hours later, and we’d sat through quite a lot of more prosaic decisions. The use of the game-controller handset was a novelty and I couldn’t really feel it was anything more than that. As such, in narrative terms, it lagged quite a bit in the middle, and by the time the moving bit happened at the end, I was ready to go. This perhaps may be a bit like life.

I’m yet to experience this directly interactive theatre in a way that makes me feel I’ve seen the future or would want to go back. (There’s a one-to-one theatre season at BAC at the moment which I want to try. Basically, though, this kind of thing makes me feel uncomfortable and I’m not sure I should feel bad about that.) I suppose I still feel that all theatre is interactive - or can be - and this kind of novelty has picked on the most superficial aspects of that potential. That’s not to condemn this show which I enjoyed and never wanted to walk out of, but I think I’ve seen more interesting work by Rimini and the project of rediscovering theatre’s power to engage its audience is not really to be found here.

On Not Writing Reviews

I’ve written comments on plays in this blog. I’m still feeling my way with this but I want to make a distinction between these comments and reviews. I’m not reviewing plays; I’m not a reviewer. The point of these are partly as an aide-memoire for me, partly a way of working through my thoughts about dramaturgy and playwriting. For that reason, the comments on shows I’ve seen comment almost exclusively on the play itself, and not much about the director, actors, designers etc. This of course makes them look like reviews because it’s a notorious failing of many British critics that they review pieces of theatre as if they were rehearsed readings of plays. In my case, I hope I am responding to plays as a peer and colleague, trying to get inside what the plays are doing and, if I have problems with the plays, then using them to think more sharply about what I am doing. (This does not inoculate me against criticism for my comments since, yes, I have chosen to make these dramaturgical notes public - because I think they might be interesting to other people - and I generally write about these plays soon after seeing them so they represent a pretty undigested response to the plays.)

I should also say that I know and like very much some critics - Karen Fricker, Aleks Sierz, Andrew Haydon a bit - and don’t mean any disrespect by distancing myself from their profession, but I don’t like it when playwrights set themselves up as critics. I’ve generally refused Night Waves and Saturday Review and Front Row for that reason.

I'm also uncomfortable as a playwright writing reviews of other playwrights. This is a curious thing since the Saturday review pages are full of novelists writing reviews of other novelists; poets also don't hold back from reviewing poets. But you rarely see playwrights reviewing playwrights. The only major example was George Bernard Shaw and he moved from one to the other. Some critics have written plays - Jeremy KIngston, Nicholas de Jongh - but not with distinction. Is it something about the public nature of the play that makes breaking rank all the more disloyal? Or is theatre, despite all rumours to the contrary, a generally much more supportive and less bitchy place than literature?