Through the Looking Glass and Inside the Sunset

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

A round-up of sorts, on Light Show, Peter and Alice, Daniel Kitson, Dirty Hands, Ring, the heart-catching joy of reading John Berger, and everything else I haven’t had time to write about elsewhere …

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“I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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At the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show last Friday, while my retinas were being slowly, dazzlingly fried, a snatch of perfect poetic clarity suddenly broke through the low chatter of fellow visitors. In the first of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s series of interconnecting rooms, each intoxicatingly suffused with a separate colour – red, then blue, then green – a little boy, no more than about seven or eight, said “it feels like being inside a sunset”. And of course he was completely, simply, beautifully right. That was what it felt like, captured inside an intense, burning redness that seemed at first to be unchanging but gradually fluctuated the longer we were in the room, its shades altering with our shifting perception, just as the colours in a sunset slowly transform.

I’m reminded of something Alex Andreou tweeted a couple of months ago: “we are born poets, but it’s squashed out of us”. Listening to this carelessly offered comment in the middle of Light Show, or to the brilliant and often startling descriptions formed by children in Andy Field’s gorgeous audio piece for the Natural History Museum, this artless command of poetry seems to be confirmed. The imagination and simplicity of this particular sliver of poetry followed me quietly around the rest of the exhibition and continued to linger a step behind me in the thoughts that I shaped in the minutes, hours and days afterwards. Because of course none of my self-conscious observations could quite match up to that giddy childish delight – though giddy feels like the right word for Light Show.

As I write this, childhood, and memory of childhood, are particular preoccupations. The other night I went with a friend to see Peter and Alice – partly, it has to be confessed, upon the persuasion of Ben Whishaw’s cheekbones – which, despite its flaws, rekindled a heart-racing, book-gobbling love for children’s literature. Christopher Oram’s design fills the stage of the Noel Coward Theatre with outsized versions of the illustrations that are vividly etched onto my memories of childhood – Captain Hook, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter. It’s one big picture book, but a theatre too, complete with a cardboard cut-out proscenium arch; this is where fictional worlds of all kinds play out.

But while the production asks many questions about childhood and growing up, fantasies and imagination, loss of innocence and the attempt to return to it, two things tugged at my mind. One was the profound effect that books can have on us as children, as I thrilled in the memory of that heady joy that used to come from jumping into a new story, a new adventure. Alice excitedly leaping down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass. The other was to do with perception, the way we see things and the way we remember. Like the Alice of the play, watching Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) developing one of the many photographic portraits he took of her and noting that in the time since the pose was captured she has already changed, we alter from moment to moment, our vision of things shifting constantly.

This chimes with my experience of Light Show, which just a week on I’m already struggling to capture with the same vividness that left me rubbing my eyes on the way out, bright dots scattering across my view of the South Bank. In lots of ways – and perhaps unsurprisingly – this is an exhibition all about perception. Light is, after all, something that we see, something that allows us to see. But the tingle of the skin next to the radiating warmth of Cerith Wyn Evans’ throbbing columns of light, or the almost oppressive sound of tumbling water in Ólafur Elíasson’s discombobulating ‘Model for a Timeless Garden’ – a magic trick of strobe lighting, revealing suspended forms both monstrous and exquisite – is enough to know that the other senses are equally vital here. It’s an exhibition that asks us to feel, in every way.

And there are surprises. Jim Campbell’s ‘Exploded View (Commuters)’ seems at first glance to be a merely pretty clutch of tiny, suspended, lightly flickering specks of light – a cloud of fireflies – but look at it for a moment and shapes begin to emerge. Inside the seemingly random collection of LEDs, figures appear to be moving, briskly striding across the field of vision. I immediately think of an atomised society of people rushing from A to B, all of us as individual dots of light, isolated yet together. In one of the sealed-off rooms that punctuate the exhibition, what initially looks like a single, curved shaft of light slicing through the space slowly bends, confining visitors within a tunnel of light that they pierce with outstretched fingers (Anthony McCall’s ‘You and I , Horizontal’).

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Then there’s one of my favourites, ‘Magic Hour’ by David Batchelor, an evocation of the colours of a Las Vegas sunset pouring outwards from a structure that is all found metal and exposed wires. For reasons I can’t quite pin down at the time, I think of Tim Etchells writing in Certain Fragments. Something about scavenging and piecing together different scraps of material, perhaps, of leaving the seams unapologetically exposed; also the way in which technology forms a constant backdrop for our lives, the neon lights (Etchells’ own work with this medium coming to mind) bleeding into the pinks and oranges of the setting sun.

Returning to the dazzling red of Cruz-Diez’s installation – another sunset – this brought back a sharp visual memory of a red-drenched scene from the Deutsches Theatre’s production of Dirty Hands, which I caught while on a trip to the face-numbing cold of Berlin last month but still haven’t found time to write about. Although surtitles supplemented my pitiful (i.e. non-existent) grasp of German, the memories I captured in the absence of taking notes are nearly all visual: the set’s astonishing revolving walls, dotted with blinking fluorescent tubes, twisting the protagonist tighter and tighter into a political labyrinth from which there is no escape; a pair of huge, cartoonish hands worn by one of the performers; the grey, solid bleakness of the wall that splits off the front of the stage in the opening scene; that violent red light (this trailer gives a fairly good sense of the aesthetic).

The play itself, written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948, sets itself in a fictional Eastern European nation in order to grapple with the political crisis surrounding the latter stages of WWII, revolving around the assassination of a leading figure in the communist party (to crudely oversimplify the intricately complex plot). Hard as it is to summon all the details from my memory now, I remember the experience of watching the production – which both my friend and I loved, by the way, despite his distinct apprehension of European theatre ever since I described Three Kingdoms to him – as being infected by the odd experience of walking around the DDR and Stasi museums earlier that same day. It was a reminder, perhaps all the more vivid for being away from home, of the contexts that inevitably inform our experience of theatre, framing the event in ways that the event itself can’t always anticipate.

But back to the chill and damp of London – almost as face-numbing as the bitter cold of Berlin in the past week or so. On Monday, after walking around the building at least three times and attracting a series of bemused frowns, I found myself in the Live Art Development Agency for the first time, at a Study Room gathering organised by Dialogue and Diana Damian to think about critical writing. For a start, that feels like a misnomer, as several people in the room (myself included) quickly expressed a certain discomfort with the term “critic” and its connotations. Personally I like the suggestion that we think of it not in terms of criticism, an idea associated with meanness, but as something critical – vital for the ecology.

While I mostly listened, people in the group spoke about collaboration, about responsiveness and responsibility, about institutions and sustainability (an ongoing battle), about thinking of the writing we do as creative practice. It’s a start, and an exciting one, but in spite of all its brilliant, impassioned discussion, the session left me punctured with self-doubt and uncertainty. The same questions keep tapping me on the shoulder, the same questions that attach themselves to every piece of criticism (if I’m even calling it criticism) I write: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? What difference is this making? And, always, could I be doing this better?

And then, later this week, by some sheer miracle of frantic web page refreshing that allowed me to get my hands on a pair of tickets, I went to see one of Daniel Kitson’s work-in-progress stand-up shows at BAC. A gorgeous muddle of anecdote, charm, self-consciousness and scattered notes, Kitson’s still nebulous show talks its way through the confused mess of his mid-thirties, a time when the certainty of youth has evaporated, bringing in its wake a crippling surge of self-doubt. I’m still only 23, but I’m not sure I was ever really in possession of that youthful certainty – or maybe I was, just in brief, flash-bulb moments. Existing in an almost permanent state of uncertainty as I do, then, I felt a shiver of recognition, the sort of comforting “me too” impulse that I suspect is part of the reason why so many of Kitson’s fans will sit poised over their refresh buttons at 11am of a morning. We like to feel that we’re not alone in our neuroses. He also spoke about how he’s seen, or might be seen, by other people, and about looking at his own beliefs and questioning them – preoccupations that haunt me more than they probably should. For that alone, my shoulders shaking with the kind of laughter that only comes from grimaced recognition, I probably would have loved the show.

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I started writing this on Friday, with every intention of clumsily blurting out my love for the Kitson show and leaving it at that. But on Friday night I was back at BAC again, this time to see (or rather hear) Ring. As I’ve been talking a lot about seeing, Ring feels like something of a break, as for most of its duration we actually see nothing at all. The show, conceived by Shunt’s David Rosenberg, situates its audience in a suffocating darkness, a pitch black not penetrated by any dot of light. We’re a long way from Light Show.

The first thing to say is that the technology behind this dark, disorientating experience is utterly, mind-bogglingly extraordinary. The piece uses binaural sound technology, which captures sounds in such a way that the recording exactly replicates the way we hear the world around us; rather than hearing everything as flat, at an equal distance, it can sound like someone is crossing the room, drawing closer, whispering in our ear. Ring is essentially an exploration of this technology, a physiological and psychological experiment that plays with our perceptions based on what we hear – hence the darkness. By plunging us into a world with no visual referents, the astonishing use of sound transports us, makes us create our own images.

It’s cripplingly hard to talk about the show without giving away the surprises on which its chilling grip depends. The set up is a sort of alternative therapy session, a gathering conducted in total darkness where we have come to be “transported”, to “imagine something, together something better”. With headphones covering our ears and the blanket of darkness wrapped tightly around us, every audience member is at the centre of their own experience of the show, positioned – despite the fact that we all sit still in the dark, not required to move – as the protagonist of the piece. It redefines the horribly overused term “immersive”, completely submerging us in a disturbing experience from which we cannot escape (unless, that is, it simply becomes too much and we raise our hand with a cry of “help!”, which one overwhelmed audience member did on the night I attended).

Still struggling to shake it off a full 24 hours later, it strikes me that it’s the sense of invasion which is most unsettling. Flooding our ears and robbing us of our other senses, the piece takes over the whole field of our perception in a way that theatre is not usually capable of doing. For all the talk of the illusion of naturalistic theatre, we can still see the proscenium arch, framing the show within a world that exists beyond it. But here, we are fully inside the piece that Rosenberg and writer Glen Neath have crafted; the seams, if not entirely invisible, can barely be traced.

The content, as a result of revelling so brilliantly in form, suffers a little. This is all about how binaural technology can be used to manipulate our perceptions of the world, but despite its sometimes disappointing content it can’t simply be written off as a case of style over substance, purely because that psychological examination of perception itself is so deeply fascinating, with myriad implications. Perhaps Ring‘s most startling achievement, other than how it deploys the dazzling technology at its disposal, is the way in which it makes us freshly aware of how much of our perception is based on what we don’t see, on what we imagine. And we can’t close our eyes on our imagination.

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I want to finish with John Berger and one last sunset. This is partly because Maddy Costa’s latest blog (as well as prompting me to listen to Patti Smith on a loop) has me returning to my heavily highlighted copy of Ways of Seeing while itching to get my hands on more of his writing. But it also feels right for a set of musings that keep returning to “ways of seeing” – seeing art, seeing the world, seeing ourselves. Reading Berger often gives me that pleasurable jolt of someone else expressing an idea I’ve tortuously grappled with in such a way that it suddenly makes perfect sense; a feeling of simultaneous revelation and realisation, uncovering something new but almost half known. So here he is, making sense of our modes of perception far more eloquently than I could ever aspire to:

“It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” – John Berger, Ways of Seeing

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A brief postscript: since writing this, I’ve gone away and read Matt Trueman’s brilliantly honest reflections on dipping his toe into embedded criticism at Ovalhouse, which feel urgently relevant to some of the questions being asked about criticism at the Study Room gathering. And while you’re there, read the reports from This is Tomorrow, which have been frying my brain and making me painfully envious all week.

The Forest and the Field, Ovalhouse

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

“Everything is still problematic concerning the real effects of the Theatre” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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As Tassos Stevens so helpfully puts it, the experience of an event begins for its audience when they first hear about it and only finishes when they stop thinking and talking about it. Therefore the beginning of my experience of The Forest and the Field dates back a while, its very first seeds planted in an idea of theatre that Chris Goode expressed in the eye of the Three Kingdoms storm. Germinating away for almost a year, the thoughts sown at that moment finally broke through the surface in a meandering thought piece that I wrote for Exeunt in anticipation of seeing this show, which feels worth including again here. Not a preview as such, but rather a pre-review. A review in anticipation.

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“All the world’s a stage”. It’s an almost meaninglessly ubiquitous snippet of the Bard that, as a theatre writer, I ought to have a dread of opening with. Yet those five painfully over-quoted words carry an intriguing implication. Because if we really do conceive of the world as a stage and our everyday exchanges as another kind of performance upon it, what does that do to theatre itself? And what impact does that understanding of the world have on the relationship between the reality of the theatre and the reality outside?

As these questions might suggest, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about theatre and the wider world – not so much in the sense of whether or not theatre can make a difference in the world beyond the space of its performance, which is an argument so often short-circuited by being debated in disingenuous or misguided terms, but more in the sense of how we imagine theatre’s place within society. This is partly due to a weekly seminar that has had me returning to – and in some cases reading for the first time – the series of relationships between theatre and society that have been theorized over the centuries: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Schiller, to name just a few of the headliners. Whether conceiving of that relationship as vexed or harmonious, the obsession with it is strikingly persistent.

Such thoughts have also surfaced partly in anticipation of Chris Goode & Company’s The Forest and the Field, which I’ll be seeing at Ovalhouse this week. As the Ovalhouse website helpfully informs me, this is “a gently seductive, immersive piece of non-fiction storytelling, which asks its audience to look at themselves, and to consider what we’re all doing when we meet in a theatre space”. Unsurprisingly, it’s that last little bit that most interests me. I didn’t see the piece’s previous incarnation back in 2009, but Chris’s distinction between “the theatre that (thinks it) shows things versus the theatre that (knows it) makes things” has been snagged on my brain long enough to made me hungry to interrogate that idea further, even if – as I suspect – I’m not fully up to the task.

The answer to that question of what we’re all doing in a theatre space might seem staggeringly obvious. Surely we are gathered together in one place, usually under the anonymous blanket of darkness, to watch other people perform. At the end we will probably applaud. We might, hopefully, think about what we’ve seen. The optimist might even insist that we leave the theatre changed in some way, galvanised to meet the challenges of the world outside.

My use of the word “outside” is not accidental. The concept of “outside”, naturally paired with “inside” as its polar opposite, seems to haunt much theatre and the discussion that surrounds it. Inside or outside the bounds of the performance event, part of or on the fringes of traditionally understood definitions of theatre, internal or external to the text. Understood in such dichotomised terms, theatre is always inside, referring to an outside that is ever separate and elsewhere. If all the world really is a stage, then perhaps the theatre is its rehearsal space.

But what my initial, crude description of what theatre does deliberately neglects is any sense of real action or making within the sphere of the event. Something happens in that space between the people who occupy it. It might have a bearing on or a certain understanding of the world beyond those four walls – in fact, it would be fairly impossible for it not to have some kind of relationship, however big or small, with the society in which it exists – but it isn’t simply a suspended act, somehow separate and sealed off from its “real” surroundings. Theatre is always in some way doing and making, perhaps at the same time as representing, and that doing is an act in and of itself, whether or not it offers a model for wider change. When thought of in this way, inside and outside – those troubling ideas that we stubbornly try not to taint with one another – become sort of irrelevant. The theatre event is both and neither and a mashed up mixture of the two.

While these confused and simplified thoughts lack nuance, at the heart of the image of theatre I’m beginning to form is a melting of the divisions drawn by the thinkers I find myself reading each week. Running through many of their arguments, whether for or against theatre and its position within society, is an assumption that theatre does one of two things: create through its form an ideal (or not so ideal, depending on the perspective) version of society within the space of the theatre event, or communicate and thus teach a mode of interacting with one another that is then to be applied to society outside. An either/or situation, not bridged by an “and”.

Although the context and exact terms of these discussions differ, there seems to be – at least to my mind – a certain similarity with Chris’s differentiation between “the theatre that (thinks it) shows things versus the theatre that (knows it) makes things”. Showing versus making, passive representation versus active enactment. What I find myself wanting to ask is whether these two functions can occur at once. Can theatre not be aware of what it’s making within the space and simultaneously offer through a form of showing or representation a new way of looking at the world?

Theatre is constantly and often unhelpfully attended by binaries – entertaining and pedagogical, dramatic and postdramatic, text based and non-text based – the most enduring of which is arguably the line it seems to draw between fiction and reality, play world and real world, whether this line is sketched at the edge of the stage or intersects with the performance itself. It’s perhaps not surprising, therefore, that again and again its purpose has been starkly seen as either demonstrating or doing, acting as performance or acting as action. But is it really so hard to imagine that it might be both?

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching, and this is all that is needed for an of theatre to be engaged” – Peter Brook

First of all, there is no such thing as an empty space. This is important. As soon as our gaze fills the space, it can no longer be empty. It’s the paradox at the heart of Peter Brook’s famous statement, and a starting point of sorts for The Forest and the Field, Chris Goode & Company’s quiet yet powerful meditation on what the hell we’re all doing when we gather together in the theatre. It’s framed as an act of storytelling, but it feels more like a gentle and occasionally troubling dream, vitally prodding at questions that permeate our modern experience of theatregoing. What do we as an audience want? What are we doing when we meet in a theatre space? Can theatre really change anything, or is it indeed theatre and our engagement with it that needs to change?

Talking of starting points, it now feels overwhelmingly apt that I began my musings on theatre and the world with a quote from Shakespeare. Because The Forest and the Field is drenched in the Bard, from the tremulous “oh” that opens Henry V to the intoxicating island of The Tempest, recognising the extraordinary extent to which Shakespeare defines our understandings of theatre. Shakespeare also offers one of the key locations of the title: the forest. This might be an actual forest, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, or it could be the island of The Tempest, the chaotic society of Illyria in Twelfth Night, the furious storm that punctures King Lear – liminal spaces, spaces that enact a certain transformation.

That “oh” that I mention from Henry V is just one of many Os dotted throughout the piece: the groaning animal “oh” of wanting; the wooden O of the original Globe theatre; the O of the appropriately shaped Ovalhouse, copied again in the circular, inward facing arrangement of the audience. O is of course also zero, a void, nothing. An empty space.

The Forest and the Field is challenging that empty space, as well as challenging the perceived emptiness of the theatre as a place apart from the rest of the world. It primarily throws open a space – not empty, but full of our thoughts and gazes – for reflecting, a space in which we might reconsider our understanding of theatre and how it works. This mainly takes the form of Chris Goode speaking to the audience as he moves around the space, while fellow performer Tom Ross-Williams adopts the more traditional role of “actor”, reciting speeches from Shakespeare and impersonating a series of figures, from Brook himself to John Cage to O.J. Simpson.

This foregrounding of the practice of acting feels significant within a piece that is deeply concerned with what theatre does, presenting us with a frame in which the idea of the actor and the actor’s role can be seen afresh. The actor is spoken of as appearing as both self and other; as spectators, we thus engage in simultaneous processes of identification and confrontation. Through the dialogue that this “acting” enters with Chris’s more direct address, we are made aware of such processes, forcing our attention on not just how theatre itself works but how we as audience members work with it.

It’s also worth pausing on that notion of the frame for a moment. As already noted, the space is arranged in a rough circle, with audience members seated on a variety of levels and in variety of positions around it. The middle of the room, at the centre of the O, is packed with a thin layer of earth, while pot plants are dotted around the audience and a large tree branch sits at the edge of the performance space. This is an evocation of the forest in the title, perhaps, but it’s a forest that we already seem to be on our way out of, the foliage thinning. Change, it suggests, is already underway. Meanwhile the light that is used throughout the piece, often illuminating the audience and denying distinctions between spectators and performers, is pointedly artificial; we are genially introduced to the technicians sitting on a raised platform in the corner, highlighting their presence. Mechanisms are visible, uncovered – or at least almost uncovered. The clothing is never quite fully stripped away.

“To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself” – John Berger

Nakedness – or rather the idea of nakedness – threads its way throughout the piece. I say the idea of nakedness because, despite the rather wonderful notice on the door warning that “this piece contains nudity and a cat” (the latter seemed to be a bit shy on the night I attended), what we see in the performance is just that – nudity. It is never true nakedness, though nakedness is what it self-declaredly aspires to. Naked body, naked earth, naked desire. The excruciating nakedness of that wide, round “oh” of wanting. As the piece itself asks, what would it take for us to bare our naked desire, to openly say aloud what we want? Can the theatre ever become a space in which this might be possible?

Through such questions, we are repeatedly asked to contemplate what theatre might be capable of achieving. Theatre’s potential is often located in its liveness, a term that we all tend to be very fond of. It suggests something exciting, something immediate, something radically opposed to a culture of distant and deferred digital communication. That notion of opposition might just be key, as it’s arguably only through the rise of a mediated, non-live (depending of course on how we define and understand “live”, a debate far too large and complicated to include here) culture that “liveness” has gained its meaning and its supposedly radical power.

This is something that The Forest and the Field lightly plays with, quietly exploiting our mediatised ways of seeing (the unavoidable echo of John Berger in that phrase feeling utterly apt in the context of this show). At one end of the space, a projector screen is suspended from the ceiling, which Chris explains was built into the show before they decided not to use video. At various points throughout, a light is shone onto the screen and Chris asks us to look at it, imagining the film sequences that are not there. In this way, recorded media – a form that has irrevocably changed our mode of perception and our understanding of the live – is only present in its absence. By pointedly not including such media, we are reawakened to its constant background presence in our lives and the saturation of our culture with its tropes and particular models of perception. This is also, of course, just another empty but not empty space onto which we project our own images.

There are other, less signposted ways in which recorded and digital media seeps into the piece. One thing that struck me about all the external material and references that are used and cited (perhaps as a way of blurring those lines between inside and outside, theatre and world, as well as recalling Barthes’ idea of the text as a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”) was the lack of a structuring cultural hierarchy. A ballad from Carousel sits alongside snippets of Johns Cage and Berger; the plentiful nods to Shakespeare are joined by an extract from O.J. Simpson’s book. Notions of high and low art don’t really enter the equation (although of course they equally never completely disappear, as my noting of these contrasts bluntly demonstrates), which perhaps hints at the breakdown of other hierarchies. It’s all quotation, all part of the fabric of modern life, of which theatre is also a part.

In the series of dream sequences that punctuate the show, using more self-consciously “theatrical” means of expression, media-soaked ways of seeing the world are again brought into play, as are other influences of today’s world. Our subconscious playgrounds take the shape of sensational movie sequences or are filled with row upon row of consumer goods we might buy – endless, tyrannical “freedom of choice”. This conjures the “synthetic wanting” of capitalism, where we can have anything we want but in fact we don’t want anything – a marked and deliberate contrast with that wanting that is so profound it can only express itself through a moaned “oh”, an absence of words. By inserting this plastic desire into the frame of a dream, its permeation is absolute; dreams and reality have become indistinguishable, and the dreaming space of the theatre takes on a strange new identity.

Gazing out of the train window, a tree is just visible over the jagged fences that line the railway, its bare, crooked branches laden with cuddly toys – a grubby menagerie of childhood remnants. Three days later, in the empty yet not empty space of Ovalhouse, another tree, dead and wrenched from nature, glares out at the audience. This tree is draped with a scarf, a plastic doll, one forlorn half of a Christmas cracker. The rescued fragments of performance.

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“Performance’s only life is in the present […] Performance’s being […] becomes itself through disappearance” – Peggy Phelan

During one dream sequence, Chris floats the premise that theatre, like so much human ritual, might gain a meaning through its ending. I’m instantly reminded of Peggy Phelan’s insistence on the disappearance of performance, which she claims as the art form’s essential attribute; for Chris, though, this is a problem rather than a liberation, an impossible puzzle of how to cling on to puffs of smoke.

It’s a concern that seems to be validated in the process of writing, itself a kind of performative act. Already the performance is slipping away from me, its memory increasingly clouded in my mind, more so with every moment that passes and every word that I write. But isn’t this thought and writing also a kind of extension of the piece? It’s a remnant of sorts, yes, but also a continuation. And without the one thing ending, the other would not be able to gain shape and meaning.

“We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. And above all else, theatre is made to teach us this” – Antonin Artaud

For all its bleak implication, I like the first part of that quote – particularly the image of the sky falling on our heads. It recalls childish fears, summoning those early moments of realisation that the world is capable of collapsing around us. And that childishness seems fitting, as this is something that we first learn as a child, taught by the experience of growing up, but that we later forget and need to be re-taught – if we agree with Artaud – by theatre. It’s at odds with the common idea that theatre is about a fictional elsewhere, that in the theatre we go to hear confessions in the conditional, a world predicated on the “what if”. But today, Chris suggests, theatre might be a space in which to assert the “what is” in the middle of the “what if” that has expanded outwards to swallow all of modern urban life. In the theatre, we need to be reminded of the way the world really is.

There seems, however, to be a certain contradiction in some of what The Forest and the Field is ultimately suggesting. Theatre, if I’ve understood correctly, needs to push against the stultifying “what if” with an assertion of “what is”, a distinction that seemingly makes it separate from the conditionality of the world in which it exists. But at the same time we are told that theatre is “just one small part of everywhere”, in the same way that “dreams are edgeless”. Theatre is and isn’t different to the rest of the world. Or maybe this is in fact doing exactly what I was trying to grasp at in the piece I wrote before seeing the show, confusing that artificial line between inside and outside.

Before I tie my brain in too many knots, I wonder if these are misplaced concerns. Perhaps the most revelatory and intoxicatingly optimistic realisation of the piece is that, as Chris points out, “we haven’t made all the theatre yet”. This isn’t it yet – its yearningly outstretched fingers never quite graze the ideal that Chris is aspiring to – but it also doesn’t have to be. Because of course the accusation that theatre can’t change the world is really just saying that it hasn’t found a way to change the world yet. In a world that’s constantly changing, the accusation doesn’t mean that theatre might not still find a form through which it can initiate that change.

All the way through this response, I’ve kept using the word “piece”. Part of that is just lazy, imprecise writing; as a critic, it’s one of many terms that I use interchangeably when talking about the production in question, even though each of those terms implies something slightly different. But there’s also something a little more precise and considered about that choice of word here.

During a talk at the Bush Theatre’s RADAR season, Chris picked up on this insistent use of “piece” by both the people making theatre and the people writing about it. In response, he posed a challenging series of questions: “If what I make, if what we make, are ‘pieces’, then what’s the whole of which each of those pieces is a piece? And how can I make the work that I share with audiences, and with my fellow artists, representative in every case of the whole of what I want? Socially, politically, sexually. What are the theatrical forms and structures that will enable me to want in public everything I want in private?”

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, and I’m not entirely sure The Forest and the Field does either. But it’s sort of liberating to think of this show as not just a solitary, isolated piece and instead to think of it as one piece of a larger whole. We haven’t made the whole yet, and perhaps we don’t yet know how to make it, but we can at least make a start on the pieces.

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One O, two Os, three Os. A chain, like the interlinked, messily pritt-sticked rings of paper once hung up around the house at Christmas. You can’t make nothing out of nothing. A double negative, recalling the insistent refrain of Kieran Hurley’s Beats: “it doesn’t mean nothing”. It doesn’t mean nothing.

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P.S. The photos of various bits of forest dotted throughout are all mine, taken near my parents’ house in Sussex an in the New Forest. As well as feeling appropriate, it seemed only fair to break up the horrendous volume of words with a bit of visual interest.

Purple Heart, Gate Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

It’s no accident that in the taut domestic space of Bruce Norris’ play the clocks are being turned back. First produced in Chicago in 2002, the piece rubs at one of the sorest wounds of recent American history – the Vietnam War – in the aftermath of another that is only just beginning to scab over. Now receiving its UK premiere at the Gate Theatre, it’s impossible not to read this searing acid burn of a play through the lens of conflicts sparked by 9/11, implicitly asking the unsettling question of whether the world is simply caught in a relentless cycle of rewind and replay.

While Vietnam is the scar that Purple Heart concerns itself with, its approach is a glancing one. In a Midwest living room in 1972, a setting realised with gaping spaces at either side that might as well be the holes blasted by loss, Carla is agonisingly caught in the process of grieving for a violent, unfaithful husband. Suffocated by condolences and stuffed with sympathetic casseroles, her strained relationships with attention starved twelve-year-old son Thor and overbearing mother-in-law Grace are shown at breaking point when soldier Purdy breaks unexpectedly into this poisonous space. It’s a classic, almost clichéd dramatic device furnished with freshly sharpened claws, tearing through the fraying fabric of the family’s worn out existence.

Not unlike the mysterious intruder in early Pinter plays, Purdy is a figure half-explained and oddly, indefinably sinister. Trevor White lends this stranger an almost disturbing stillness, an upright, static quality that is physically at odds with Amelia Lowdell’s restless, frenetic, maniacally laughing Carla. As startlingly candid dialogue bounces sharply between the pair, there is a marked rupture to the naturalism of the piece, an almost painful heightening of the situation until it reaches the piercing pitch of Grace’s faulty hearing aid battery. Acerbically funny and flooded with an acute sense of the ridiculous, the believability of the scenario – a visit from a soldier who met Carla in a military hospital and who may or may not have been friends with her late husband – is less important than its grim power to compel.

The world that Christopher Haydon’s production wrenches us into is one of laughs gulped down with horror, of love mashed up with violence and kids enraptured by stories of torture and aggression. It’s important, though, that the worst is never seen and even its spoken references are spare; structured in this way, the Vietnam War is a constant, queasy backdrop, like the patterned yellow wallpaper pasted on the walls of Carla’s suburban prison. Within this retrospective frame, the specific conflict in question, like the desperate relations of these characters, is only symptomatic of a wider, never fully specified sickness.

Intelligently framed, too, is Simon Kenny’s canny design for the small space of the Gate, placing the audience in banks on either side of the family’s dissected living room. This configuration forces us to look quite literally through the play and see ourselves almost mirrored on the other side; a reflection, perhaps, of an ugliness that Norris’ broken characters fail to submerge. It is this penetrating ugliness, despite an occasional heavy-handedness in the approach, that ensures its unrelenting assault pummels audience as much as characters. It may be grimacingly entertaining, but it is never easy to watch.

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

The Yellow Wallpaper, Schaubühne Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Regularly and repeatedly claimed by feminist critics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s nineteenth-century story The Yellow Wallpaper is not a text that begs to be updated. Synonymous with the oppressive patriarchy of its time, which condemned women such as the story’s narrator to a diagnosis of “hysteria”, the piece holds a central place within feminist literary histories – a place that might itself be an intriguing site for contemporary investigation. Instead, this new version from Lyndsey Turner and Katie Mitchell drags Gilman’s story into the present day, making explicit the then unrecognised post-natal depression that seems to be hinted at by the narrative. It’s both a fascinating and a frustrating move.

Transplanting Gilman’s troubled, restless narrator from a nineteenth-century American summer house to the German countryside of the present day, this dramatic reimagining very deliberately refracts the tale through later psychological lenses, rendering it into a modern study of depression. The originally nameless protagonist, now identified as Anna, is listless in the house her husband has brought them to for her recuperation, often in bed during the day, yet plagued at night by a conviction that something – or someone – is moving behind the wallpaper.

Mitchell’s approach to this story is a meticulously deconstructed one, breaking down her intricate, technically dazzling production into its individual components. The Schaubühne’s wide stage is dissected into three segments, above which a large, attention-stealing screen hosts projections of film being captured live by an intrusive crew of camera operators. Two of these divided sections of the performance space are given over to precisely detailed, almost identical renderings of the room in which the protagonist of the piece is confined, while the third is a closed-in box fronted by a large window, in which foley artist Cathlen Gawlich visibly creates the sounds that ripple through the production – footsteps, scraping, knocks at the door. Meanwhile a similar, smaller space encloses actress Ursina Lardi, a lone, starkly lit figure speaking into a microphone.

Through these mechanisms, the production depicts protagonist Anna’s anguished descent into madness in close-up, punishingly claustrophobic detail. From the moment she arrives at this room in a remote country house – and even before her entrance – every element of the place is heightened. The disturbingly enhanced sound effects, produced before our eyes, assault the ears, while the vivid wallpaper itself takes on a strangely disquieting pallor under Jack Knowles’ evocative lighting. As a psychological device, Mitchell’s technique is unnervingly effective. Not only does this approach give the audience startlingly intimate access to Anna’s own crisis; every dismantled element of the production repeats the feeling of being trapped, from the tightly enclosed space in which Lardi voices Anna’s thoughts, to the close, intruding presence of cameras, to the screens that periodically slide down to cut off sections of the stage.

In its technical allusions to thriller and noir, genres with which the piece thematically shares a number of features – the creepy house, the scent of mystery, the escalating urgency – the overwhelming presence of film amplifies this sense of unease. Throughout the production’s most disturbing sequence, as Anna tears frantically at the wallpaper, a camera pressed close while the intensified sound of scratching floods the auditorium, we might be trapped inside a psychological horror movie. Yet perhaps there is more to this technique than pure atmosphere. In addition to the live film being recorded and projected throughout, bookending the production are two pre-recorded film segments, self-consciously styled as home videos. This juxtaposition makes more visible the concern with representation that persists throughout, implicitly asking how we perceive ourselves and how we choose to present ourselves to others, particularly in the context of a mediatised modern culture. Is this not, like Gilman’s original narrator and perhaps even Gilman herself, a woman struggling with how she is seen in the world?

The question of gender, however, is oddly muted, as is the feminist genealogy that has wrapped itself around Gilman’s text. As a non-German speaker with no access to the script, it’s impossible to muse on any insights that Turner’s textual reworking might offer, but the half-informed eye – when not darting between the multiple facets of Mitchell’s intriguing staging – catches a sense of something missing. Beneath the technical accomplishment and the queasy shiver of unease, there is the nagging suspicion of a certain hollowness. Disturbingly, devastatingly acute as the psychological portrait might be, its significance remains elusive.

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

God’s Property, Soho Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Through the door in the back wall of Ellen Cairns’ set, visible in brief, snatched glances as performers slam it open and closed, the world is all askew. The outer walls of a Deptford housing estate unsettlingly loom, threatening and out of kilter, yet at the same time oddly flat. It’s a fitting metaphor for the crooked, broken realm of Arinze Kene’s play, where identities are doubled and conflicted and the world of the protagonists teeters dangerously on a precipice. But despite rapidly rising stakes and an imposed sense of urgency, the play too exists on something of a level plane, never quite achieving the texture that its early scenes tantalisingly promise.

Kene’s premise revolves around the reunion of two mixed-race brothers in 1980s Deptford, at the height of local tensions. Chima returns home from ten years in prison to a cold, aggressive greeting from Onochie, the younger sibling who neither knows nor welcomes him and who stubbornly seeks to reject his own Nigerian heritage. The initial conflict over racial identity that wedges itself between the estranged brothers is quickly joined by the divisive ghosts of Chima’s past, a past whose consequences gradually smash their way into the kitchen where the siblings haltingly renegotiate their relationship.

As the brittle, wary Onochie, Ash Hunter is all youthful bravado and prickly contradiction, a moody wannabe skinhead not yet grown into his bovver boots. Explosions of wounded anger are offset by moments of startling tenderness, particularly when bouncing off girlfriend Holly, the local white girl whose entanglement in the crime for which Chima was accused acts as a catalyst for escalating revelations. Unwittingly caught in the eye of this storm, Ria Zimtrowicz’s Holly is a lightning bolt of teenage attitude and optimism, precisely and hilariously capturing the naivety, awkwardness and bolshily faked confidence of adolescence.

Michael Buffong’s production is at its best when continuing in this observational vein, hitting delicately and often poetically on truths about both human relationships and the knotty process of defining one’s own identity. Through the contrasting experiences of Onochie and Kingsley Ben-Adir’s older, battle-scarred Chima, the question of whether it’s ever possible to choose one’s racial identity is probingly posed. The piece’s structure and characters begin to unravel, however, as the reality of the situation and of Chima’s past is delivered in a series of unnecessarily heavy punches – a blurted name, the discovery of a letter, a furious outpouring of truth.

Throughout this heightened drama, the family kitchen is a room under siege from all angles, on the point of collapsing from the weight of external pressure. It’s a pressure that is reflected in Cairns’ design, a detailed domestic space that crumbles away unevenly at the edges, giving way to a city ruptured by violence. This is the London of mass unemployment and the Brixton riots, an almost apocalyptic urban environment that the production repeatedly reminds us of. The contemporary parallels and resonances are never pointed at, but are ever hauntingly present.

The grim familiarities of this environment also mouth the unspoken question of whether anything has really changed. Onochie may be, as he proudly declares, “made in England”, but Kene’s recurring references to blood – both its inheritance and its spilling – suggest that it’s what runs in the veins that continues to matter in our society. Just as its conclusion remains suspended, the question of change is one that this production decides not to answer, but still it seems to hang in the air, as unresolved and off-centre as the world outside. While the piece as a whole may lose its way, the view framed by Cairns through the doorway says it all.

Photo: Helen Maybanks