Deborah Pearson

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Deborah Pearson and I are out of time with one another. As our emails ping back and forth, Pearson is in Toronto, Canada, four hours behind me in London. Our attempted interviews are a series of near misses. Eventually, Pearson responds to my questions by email, composing answers in the present for me to read in the future. Time, aptly enough, keeps (or, rather, kept) getting in the way.

Time is a recurring interest in Pearson’s work. Like You Were Before, made in 2010, was built around a video taken on Pearson’s last day in her native Canada five years previously, exploring the gap between her past and present selves. She’s returning to it at Battersea Arts Centre another five years on, with a further gulf of time between all these different versions of herself: the person in the video, the person who made the show, and the person performing it now. After looking backwards in that earlier piece, The Future Show (also returning to BAC this week) directed its attention in the opposite direction. Each fresh incarnation of the performance – rewritten every time – made predictions about the coming minutes, hours and years, looking ahead to the rest of Pearson’s life. And this summer at Forest Fringe in Edinburgh I saw a work-in-progress of Pearson’s latest show, History History History, again concerned with time but this time on a larger – if still personal – scale, exploring all the past events that led to Pearson being here (or rather there, in Toronto, when we speak; or perhaps London or somewhere else entirely by the time you read this) today.

“It’s the thing you can always come back to with an audience,” suggests Pearson, pinning down theatre’s particular affinity with this subject matter. “You are here, and I am here, and we will soon not be here. ‘Here’ being in the theatre together, but of course that also leads on to that eventuality of the bigger ‘here’ – meaning that a lot of work about time ends up becoming about mortality. That should be depressing but it’s actually what makes theatre thrilling I think. The defiance of that eventuality – the decision to sit in a room together while we’re alive and sit, or be bored, or be entertained, but just to share the fact that we are all here together now. It’s such a beautiful defiance and acknowledgement of the passing of time that it always seems a shame to me not to take a moment, while performing, to point it out or remind ourselves of it.”

Over email (speaking to me from a different time zone in the recent past), Pearson wonders whether her fascination with time is born out of her current doctoral research, which is investigating narrative in contemporary performance. “One definition of narrative that I came across somewhere was that narrative is the way that we make sense of our experiences over time,” she tells me. But the interest also goes back much further. “One of my mom’s favourite memories of me as a child is of me telling her, when I was about five years old, that I wished we could all stay the same age forever,” says Pearson. “That nobody in our lives or family would ever get any older or would ever die.”

“There’s a quote by a poet that I really like,” she continues, “which is something about how ‘I keep writing the same poem over and over, just trying to get it right.’ It’s funny – a lot of my work was about memory and nostalgia when I first started out, and then after making Like You Were Before, I didn’t necessarily feel I had definitively gotten it right, but I did feel that I’d gone as far with memory and nostalgia as I wanted to go. I felt that I had kind of internally resolved it as a theme for myself. Then The Future Show came along and it turned out that there was another aspect of time – which I suppose was to do with our orientation in time, and anxiety, and the unknown, that started to really interest me. Then I thought I was finally done with time. But my newest piece that opens next year, History History History, is about our personal relationship to history. So I guess I’m never done with time. It is the most universal theme, I think. It is the one thing that we’re all subject to, that we’re all at the behest of. Whether or not you fear for your own mortality, we are all on this merry go round made of time together.”

There’s also something particular about time, and our changing relationship to it, in the twenty-first century. We’re living in an age in which everything is speeded up and – thanks to the internet and cheap, fast air travel – time and space have become compressed. The emphasis is on the now. “Fredric Jameson talks about the end of historicity in his recent lectures,” says Pearson. “He claims that we’re living through a time where there is no past and certainly no future. We are obsessed with the momentary.” While Pearson has her doubts about some of Jameson’s claims – “it could also be that Jameson is just getting old and nearing the end of his own life” – she thinks “it would be difficult to argue that using the internet as frequently as most people do is not having a profound impact on our understanding of time and on our attention spans”. By comparison, theatre is a slow form in a fast world, forcing us to experience the slipping away of the minutes without the distraction of multiple devices or browser windows.

Over the years, time has also had its effect on how Pearson understands (and will understand) the shows she’s made about its passing. “When people asked what Like You Were Before was about, I used to say that it was about the maddening fact that time keeps going. But having just started dipping my toe into re-learning the script and the show, I think what it’s really about is mourning the passing of a time and place in one’s life – the end of an era, that is only really recognised as an era at all because it ended.” Meanwhile The Future Show has, like all one-time possible futures, become a thing of the past.

“I had to stop re-writing The Future Show,” Pearson explains, “because, just as I had predicted in an early version of the script, it made my obsessive compulsive disorder worse and would give me anxiety about ridiculous things. At some point it was clear that the task of rewriting The Future Show was as unhealthy for me as it was interesting for an audience, and sometimes more unhealthy for me than it was interesting for an audience.” The version coming to BAC, then, is a mix-tape of different imagined futures from the show’s 27 past performances. Reflecting on the show’s life since it was first created in January 2013, Pearson comments that “it does something very strange to one psychologically to have painstakingly thought through all your future actions on that many occasions”.

Following the compilation shows at BAC, The Future Show’s next (and possibly final) outing will be on the page, a medium that – unlike theatre – allows readers to encounter it in multiple different, idiosyncratic parcels of time. This month, Oberon Books are publishing a volume containing a “score” for the piece and past scripts of The Future Show from three different performances in three different time zones: Brighton, Lisbon and Austin, Texas. It’s the latest experiment with the subject that continues to niggle away at Pearson. “I’m really interested in knowing how the scripts are going to work in this form, and whether or not they can give a casual reader who hasn’t seen the show a sense of it,” she says (or rather said, at her computer in Toronto, from a different time zone in the recent past). “I guess time will tell.”

And Now: The World!, Hackney Showroom

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

“We’re getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere, connected to all the different places they want to be.”

I write this with my phone sat next to me. With the slightest move of my arm, I can pick up a call, check for notifications, see if the little email icon is nagging me to clear my inbox. So far today I’ve communicated over phone, text, email, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook. Skype is open on my laptop, along with a noisy crowd of different web browser tabs and three separate Word documents. All the information I could ever want is just a click away.

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This is the sort of hectic, always-on digital existence thatAnd Now: The World! depicts. A slab of text by Sibylle Berg (here translated by Ben Knight), the play itself is a bit like the overwhelming data streams of the internet, there to be accessed – as the note at the beginning, read aloud, makes clear – by one voice or many. In director Abigail Graham and dramaturg Clara Brennan’s version, this anxious, almost hyperactive stream of consciousness is all spoken by Jennifer Jackson, moving restlessly around Sarah Beaton’s sleek, white, MacBook-style set. Her thoughts – about herself, about the world – are constantly punctuated by beeps and chirps; a distracting digital cacophony of alerts.

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The unnamed speaker of And Now: The World! is sharing. Oversharing, some might say. She’s broadcasting her life (literally to us, virtually to the many eyes and ears of the internet), but with the fear that no one is listening. This is what the internet offers us: both an audience and a gaping void; a desperation to share, yet a feeling that our words and thoughts and emotions are simply entering a vacuum. Breaking repeatedly through Nick Powell’s crowded sound design, and eventually played at length, Sherry Turkle’s famous “alone together” TED Talk acts as a sort of half-mocking key for this production, the protagonist a living demonstration of Turkle’s aphorism “I share therefore I am”.

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In narrative terms, the show doesn’t really go anywhere. The monologue loops, repeats, spirals off into transgressions, all separated into social media style nuggets. As delivered by Jackson, the whole thing pulses with anxiety: FOMO writ large. The speaker assiduously avoids venturing out into the world, yet she feels the need to check in with it constantly – if only to shower it with her disillusioned disdain. Zumba, baking, consumer culture – all are met with wry scorn, dismissed as distractions from a dying planet. The critique, though, is a knowingly empty one, delivered by a speaker who prefers to lock herself away from the world with the comforting chorus of her technology. She used to vent her rage by beating up young men in the streets, but now she just sits in her room, selling fake viagra on the internet.

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In a recent piece in the LRB, Rebecca Solnit describes digital communication as positioning us between solitude and communion, “a shallow between two deep zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others”. We are never truly on our own and yet never truly withanother person, part of us always elsewhere. This is certainly true for Berg’s speaker, who is not content alone or with others. She instead chooses to communicate with all the people in her life electronically – by Skype, by text, even by the now nostalgic digital communication channel of MSN Messenger – but that communication only seems to cause stress. For such a seemingly contained, introverted piece, though, this production is incredibly physical and dynamic. Frantically responding to messages across different electronic platforms, Jackson leaps athletically around the set – a physical manifestation of the mental acrobatics required by today’s atomised forms of sociability. We might be stuck, but we’ve never had to do quite so much moving.

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Little about And Now: The World! offers up particularly new insights. The lost, disconnected, screwed-over generation that its speaker represents is now all too familiar on stage, depicted most powerfully in shows like Barrel Organ’s Nothing, while the implicit critique of digital communication finds echoes in pieces such as I Wish I Was Lonely by Chris Thorpe and Hannah Jane Walker. The speaker’s paradoxical blend of anger and apathy, together with the ambivalent portrayal of digital media’s effects on our lives, is very recognisable, as are the many swipes made at shallow, hypocritical twenty-first-century society. For all that familiarity, though, Graham’s production still has some bite. “We’re shattered,” writes Solnit of the impact of today’s technology. “We’re breaking up.” And Now: The World! depicts that shattering in process.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html

Photo: Flavia Fraser-Cannon.

Beasty Baby, Polka Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

As anyone who’s spent time in the company of a bawling newborn will know, babies are complicated little creatures. That, essentially, is the premise of Theatre-Rites’ brilliantly simple new show for three to six year olds. Sweetly, amusingly, unhurriedly, Beasty Baby offers a series of snapshots of everyday life with these (sometime) bundles of joy, lurching from the adorable to the maddening and back again.

The baby in question is a handheld puppet, deftly manipulated by Theatre-Rites’ cast of three. Isolated in the middle of a wintry landscape, the trio suddenly find themselves landed with this temperamental infant’s care and do the same as all new parents: make it up as they go along. They cradle, they sing, they even do acrobatics trying to keep their new charge happy. As time passes, the unpredictable sprog throws up new challenges, with the grown-ups forever running (often quite literally) to catch up.

It works, then, for adults as much as for kids. Little ones giggle at the cheeky demands of the tiny tyrant, while parents make noises of weary, affectionate recognition. While little really happens, cycles of repetition and change keep the show moving forward, often driven by the seamlessly incorporated live music. Routines are established, repeated and disrupted, accompanied by a playful soundtrack. It’s all carefully calibrated to the attention span of its target audience, while achieving the double feat of keeping us bigger kids captivated at the same time.

Simplicity and clarity extend to every area of the production. The Ikea-esque wooden furniture of Verity Quinn’s design unfussily evokes both home and obstacle course, while there’s a fairytale glow to the landscape of trees and snow beyond the set’s single window. Days melt into nights melt into days again with the aid of Chris Randall’s lighting and the company’s graceful choreography of daily rituals: playing, feeding, burping. Change, as so often in life, sneaks in slowly.

It might not sound like much, but the skill of Sue Buckmaster’s deceptively straightforward production lies in finding both the sublime and the ridiculous in the familiar acts of child-rearing. Over the course of one long night, performer John Leader’s attempts to lull the mewling baby to sleep become a sort of dance, as he tiptoes, pirouettes and eventually levers himself athletically into the cot, infant in hand. The baby itself, meanwhile, is a brilliant comic creation, given cutely gabbling voice by Sian Kidd. As infant becomes toddler, both the noise level and the laughs increase, the naughtiness striking just the tone with the young audience.

In the end, though, the beastliness turns out to be worth it for the beauty – especially in the gorgeous, utterly enchanting finale. Beasty Baby is, ultimately, a celebration of all the chaos wrought by the arrival of a little one, animating for parents and kids alike the complicated joy of what it means to be a family.

Sparks, Old Red Lion

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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There’s something elemental about Sparks. It’s all water and fire: two opposing forces meeting, like the two sisters at the play’s heart. Jess turns up on Sarah’s doorstep drenched, clasping a fishbowl in both hands. “Soaked,” she says. “All the way through. Think I’ve got. Got wet bones.” Sarah, when she allows herself to dream, dreams of the stars, burning fiercely in the sky. It’s the night before bonfire night, the country prepared to briefly ignite, but for now the water pours steadily down.

This is the tenor of Simon Longman’s play and Clive Judd’s production at the Old Red Lion: lyrical, dreamlike. Pared back to the basics, Sparks might not sound like much. A woman returns home to see the younger sister she abandoned twelve years previously, desperately attempting to turn back time. The domestic drama of the homecoming is hardly anything new. And yet … “transcend” is a word used too frequently and too carelessly, but it feels justified to say that Sparks transcends its premise, becoming much, much more than the sum of its parts.

There is, at first, a spikiness to the situation established by Longman and Judd. Sophie Steer’s Jess, vibrating with anxiety, vomits out a relentless flood of words. She can’t stop talking. Sarah, on the other hand, can barely wrench a single syllable from her throat. As played by Sally Hodgkiss, she’s frighteningly still, paralysed by shock. The older sister dances around the younger, her jittering energy spreading outwards in ripples to the audience. We’re tensed, waiting for the confrontation or revelation that dramatic convention dictates must be just around the corner.

But like Alice Birch’s Little Light – another dagger-sharp and devastating play about families and the passing of time – Sparks keeps us waiting. There’s a lot, in fact, that the two pieces have in common. Both take familiar, arguably even hackneyed dramatic set-ups and delicately subvert them, stretching the expectations of an audience almost to breaking point. And both revolve around the fragile relationship between two sisters, bound together by blood and memories yet ripped asunder by events.

In the case of Jess and Sarah, they are speaking across a gulf, one that only seems to widen for most of the first half. Jess is frantic, speaking to fill up the silence, while Sarah gives her little in return. One speaks in outpourings, the other in clipped half sentences. Yet, perhaps most surprisingly of all, it’s funny. Dark and desperate, yes, but funny all the same. The careful rhythm of the performances highlights the jarring humour of awful situations – that very British tendency to find something to laugh about even from the depths of despair.

Indeed, careful might describe the whole production. No choices feel thrown away. The style is naturalism shot through with memory and, at moments, a little bit of magic. Subtle (and one less subtle, but completely earned) shifts in Mark Dymock’s lighting take us back through time as both sisters gradually pick over the past; likewise Giles Thomas’s sound design, which you hardly notice until suddenly you realise it’s transported you. Jemima Robinson’s design, unfussy and realistic for the most part, uses the tiny but significant detail of peeled back wallpaper to suggest the tearing away of the years. Peeking through underneath, a Winnie the Pooh pattern – the one visual reference to Jess and Sarah’s fraught, shared childhood. And the swapping of the two central roles each night, a device that could be no more than a gimmick (albeit an impressive one), makes complete sense for a play that deals so much with the roles we fall into in a family.

In the end, what matters more than the discovery that we’re primed for – the unexpected twist, or the key to this strained sibling relationship – is simply these two characters in the same space together. I’m reminded, alongside Little Light, of Robert Holman: as in so many of his plays, Sparks is about the people and the conversation. Longman’s dialogue is exquisitely crafted, as accomplished in tense, terse exchanges as in meandering, almost poetic speeches. It doesn’t matter that little really happens to the two protagonists over the course of the play, because so much happens between them. It’s simple, perhaps, but startling nonetheless.

Photo: JKF Man.

Invisible Treasure, Ovalhouse

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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There’s always a promise held somewhere in interactive theatre. There’s the idea, cherished by so many of its makers, that by making the audience physically active we’ll become activated in other ways as well. That by getting us on our feet and interacting with one another, we’ll be shaken out of our stupor and become – however briefly – part of the sort of utopian community that all theatre holds the fragile potential for.

So much interactive theatre, though, has become lazy or cynical or both, trading on a label that suddenly has currency in the “experience economy” we now live in. Far too often, “interactive” (encased suspiciously in quotation marks) means little more than a marketing tick-box. Supposedly unique experiences are deeply derivative and being physically active becomes just another way of being mentally passive.

In their ambitious new show, fanSHEN are attempting to recover some of that essential promise. With no performers but a hefty load of technology, Invisible Treasure is experimenting with what it’s possible for people to do together in a space: how far they are willing to play and to work together, and when they will challenge authority. This is theatre that’s trying in some way to model how we interact in the world beyond these four walls; as the company’s description puts it, it is a world “that feels like the inside of a computer game but yet seems strangely similar to our own”. It is, as I say, ambitious.

And for the moment, at least, fanSHEN fall short of those ambitions. They’ve saddled themselves with a Catch-22 of a project: to develop, Invisible Treasure needs testing with audiences, but that testing requires exposing it in a delicate, unfinished state. It’s still a work-in-progress, then, ironing out flaws and glitches along the way. Writing about it also feels like something of a work-in-progress – an unfinished response to an unfinished show.

The computer game reference point in Invisible Treasure’s blurb is an apt one. Walking into the sleek white box of Cécile Trémolières’ design, all we have to go by is a single screen displaying cryptic instructions. It’s like a puzzle, but one that can only be collectively solved. There are lights, sounds and a colourful, textured floor, as well as a huge, ominous white rabbit looming in the corner (echoes of Alice in Wonderland as we plunge down the digital rabbit hole). A Big Brother-esque figure is watching and our actions as we progress through confusing levels can either please or displease him, as updates on the screen inform us.

Audience involvement requires a careful framework, establishing parameters in which participants can exercise a degree of freedom. It might go against what fanSHEN are trying to do, but audience members – especially awkward, reserved, stereotypically British audience members (*raises hand*) – respond well to guidelines and limitations. As it currently exists, Invisible Treasure is just a bit too baffling and amorphous. Whether or not you choose to play by them, games need rules. The different levels here are often frustratingly opaque, and whether we progress by effort or by default is unclear. It’s hard to know what we are supposed to be achieving or resisting.

That said, in certain moments the piece is skilful in coaxing its audience into involvement and cooperation. The simplicity of manoeuvring our bodies into shapes, reminiscent of school drama exercises, quickly gets everyone working together (if with mixed success). And I loved the dance sequence, in which we are all encouraged first in protective darkness and then in exposing light to boogie in a series of familiar styles (conclusion: I can’t line dance to save my life, but I love a bit of the twist).

After puzzling (often unwittingly) our way through the show’s levels, though, the final reveal (SPOILER ALERT) feels a little unearned. That slightly terrifying rabbit cracks open down the middle and we step through the looking glass into a backstage space, all wires and controls. This is where fanSHEN really frame the intentions of the piece, but it feels like something of a shortcut. On the outside walls of the space we’ve just emerged from, questions are scrawled, asking us about cooperation and resistance both within and beyond the walls of the theatre. Pens invite our responses, but most answers speak of confusion – a common response to the show, it would seem.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the complicated motion-sensor technology has eaten up much of fanSHEN’s development time, with the dramaturgy having to take a backseat. What the piece is trying to do – using interaction as a prompt to consider our interactions in the wider world and all of their political implications – is interesting and the set-up of the performance is intriguing, but as an experience it doesn’t yet cohere. Tensions that could be fascinating, such as that between the Big Brother element and the cooperation asked of us in each level, are currently just a bit awkward, while the directness of the questions we are issued with at the end feels as though it is making up for the lack of clarity elsewhere. There’s definitely something here, but it needs more time – and more audiences – to begin realising its ambitions. 

Photo: Cat Lee.