Paper Cinema’s Odyssey, BAC

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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The clue to Paper Cinema’s work is all in the name. Borrowing from film, animation, comic book and puppetry, this is indeed cinema performed through the medium of paper; scenes formed live from hundreds of paper cut-outs and projected onto a sail-like sheet hanging at the back wall of BAC’s Council Chamber. Not quite definable as theatre, film or visual art, it might instead simply be classified as sheer, eye-popping ingenuity.

Using this distinctive method of manoeuvring paper models and drawings in front of mounted video cameras, Paper Cinema wordlessly retell the story of the Odyssey. Simple line drawings and an evocative score are injected with the heroic qualities of Homer’s verse, transporting us to heaving seas and scorched deserts, all lightly coloured by the recognisable iconography of Hollywood. Telemachus’ journey to track down his missing father takes on the character of an American road trip; Hades is a hell of dreamlike 70s psychedelia; the action movie and historical epic are repeatedly invoked. Even the meticulously honed process of framing these scenes imitates the visual movement and camera angles of the movies, rendering afresh the familiar techniques of cinema.

Strikingly – perhaps even more striking than the dazzling artistry itself – the production lays bare all its inner workings. On one side of the stage, two of the company sit surrounded by paper models, swiftly manipulating them in front of two cameras, while on the other side the band energetically dash between various instruments and objects, a live foley team in action. As stunning projections jostle for visual attention with the unveiled, astonishing work of the artists, the eye is torn by a desire to look simultaneously at the images and how they are being produced; at the magic and at the magician. This is not to suggest that the magic is ruined – if anything, the visible labour only makes the illusion all the more extraordinary at the same time as breaking it – but it does tear at the attention, sometimes productively, sometimes frustratingly.

Perhaps it’s churlish of me, given the undeniable wonder that the work excites, but I found a small part of myself always reaching for that extra little insight that the piece never quite offers up. Rippling with charm and beautiful to look at, it’s pulse-quickeningly gorgeous but paper-thin. In between being dazzled by the miniature visual feats of the company’s storytelling, I wonder why, other than the understandable artistic ambition of taking on a work of such epic scale, Paper Cinema have settled on the Odyssey. There is maybe something about the timeless appeal of such narratives and the ways in which they find themselves reflected in forms, such as the Hollywood movie, which persist today. Paper Cinema’s endlessly inventive visual techniques also have a habit of making unfamiliar the ubiquitous narrative archetypes of both heroic literature and modern cinema, although of course this is not necessarily specific to Homer and doesn’t really offer an illuminating new way of reading the tale of Odysseus’ famous journey home.

These, however, are nit-picking objections, complaints that quickly dissolve when confronted with yet another display of artistic virtuosity. Precise, delicate layering of the tiny paper models allows the camera to peek into windows and enter through doorways; flickering torchlight plunges us into a raging storm; the breathless chase of a boar hunt is swiftly summoned by sweeping fragments of scenery. And all the while, married to this skill is a homemade aesthetic that it’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with, recalling childhood paper cut-outs and games of make believe. By the end, whatever its small failings, it’s almost impossible to do anything but grin at the playful, mesmerising joy of invention.

Money – The Gameshow, Bush Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Ever wondered what 10,000 pound coins look like? The immediate answer is not very much. Walking into the main space at the Bush Theatre, configured as a gameshow set complete with flashing lights and garish set decoration, the pile of shiny gold items is disappointingly and surprisingly small. While this underwhelming realisation might not be the intended effect of placing so much cash on stage, it does have a fitting resonance with the performance of money in our society. Like the illusion of theatre, it relies on us believing in it, accepting one thing as standing for another. Except the idea represented by money is a hollow one, divorced even from the gold that the coins’ shiny surface suggests – a sign with nothing behind it, empty simulacra. We’re in the desert of the real and everything is up for grabs.

The function of the cash on stage in Clare Duffy’s show is to explain the financial crash of 2008, with a little help from two hedge fund managers turned performance artists. Queenie and Casino, played by the brilliant Lucy Ellinson and Brian Ferguson, split the audience into two teams and pit us against each other, playing games and placing bets in a bid to win the pile of coins; games fittingly involving bubbles and balloons teach us about long and short bets, dramatising with the help of audience members the culture of risk that led to financial collapse. The other and arguably more powerful effect of these games is to draw us into the adrenaline-fuelled thrill of the trading floor, injecting us with the giddy exhilaration that drives bankers, gamblers and gameshow contestants alike. Between these games, short scenes narrate the story of Queenie and Casino’s own involvement in the financial crisis, a bursting of the bubble that, far from avoiding, they actually placed a high-stakes bet on taking place.

In contrast with the alienating jargon that excludes many from an understanding of financial operations, the games devised by Duffy are pointedly accessible and quickly recognisable, evoking the playground more than the trading floor. Players shout and laugh in excitement, the audience whoops and jeers, Queenie and Casino bicker and tease. This childishness is visually reinforced at every turn, surrounded by bubbles and balloons, buckets and spades. The implication is perhaps that there is something immature and stunted about this way of playing with money, or maybe it is a game that has a primitive appeal to all of us. The riotous fun that is encouraged, however, threatens to undo its own work; as soon as the experience becomes too game-like, the sensation that all this risk-taking is ‘just playing’ becomes once again perpetuated, distancing us from a crisis that we can therefore dismiss.

Similarly, the doubled performance of money, while making these signifiers strangely unfamiliar, also runs the risk of departing so far from the real that it can be consigned simply to fiction. The further we feel from what the money represents, the more we think – like the traders – that what we do with it doesn’t have real effects. It is this flirtation with the performative function of money, however, that is one of the most fascinating aspects of the production. As Queenie and Casino repeatedly assert, money is founded on belief, on faith. But what happens to that belief in a theatre environment? What happens when a mimetic act is folded over on itself? Reflecting on the performance, it suddenly occurs to me that coin is an anagram of icon, with all its connotations of belief and worship but also a suggestion of something ultimately empty, a shiny surface concealing nothing beneath. It’s the exposure of this concealment that the show partly enacts, a stripping away of our socialised belief in money, but by the end the sheen is beginning to return.

The final portion of the show, once the games have been played and the fate of Queenie and Casino decided by which of their teams wins (Queenie’s – my team – on the night I went), there is a jolting gear change. Suddenly plunging us into the bleak reality of our zombie economy, accompanied by an abrupt shift from the flashing lights of the gameshow to a row of stark, blinking fluorescent strips, the piece changes track so rapidly that it’s possible to be derailed. There is a hovering moment at which the audience lurches uncertainly between smiling humour and a tentative suspicion that this is meant to be taken seriously. And it is horribly, gut-twistingly serious. The conclusion, unravelling slightly, but aptly so, reminds us of the situation that we push to the back of our minds, that we paste over with stories and a stubborn belief in shiny, worthless objects. It’s chaotic and terrifying and depressing.

As Queenie and Casino dance a dangerous tango, narrating the process of financial collapse as they twist around the stage, they refer to something known as ‘Roadrunner Syndrome’: “when you run off a cliff so fast that you keep on going on just thin air. It’s only when you notice that the ground isn’t there anymore that you fall.” This is what happened at the start of the crash, as banks ploughed on oblivious to the bubble bursting around them. But in many ways I’d suggest that we’re still treading that thin air, supporting ourselves on a slim but persistent belief in the mimetic structures of money. This production might make us glance down for a moment, maybe drop a couple of feet with a lurch of the stomach, but we don’t quite hit the levelling ground.

Image: Simon Kane.

In The Republic of Happiness

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

In writing about this production, I’ve taken something of a counter-intuitive approach – or if not counter-intuitive, then certainly counter to conventional critical practice. I saw the show before Christmas without any intention of writing about it, subsequently discussed it in a seminar group, read all the reviews I could get my hands on, and feverishly combed my way through the script. Essentially, I pursued my fascination with the piece down every avenue other than writing about it, before deciding (some time after the production closing) that I was going to have to write about it after all. As a result, what follows is at least partly the product of osmosis …

“Happiness is never experienced, only remembered” – Oscar Levant

The above quote, unexpectedly dredged up from the depths of my memory somewhere, seems like a fitting place to start. If happiness is an emotion that can’t be fully experienced in the present, then in today’s society it is a sensation that is not so much remembered as shared. Whether via social media updates, glossily vacuous magazine interviews or the compulsive confessionals of reality television, emotion has become currency, a commodity to trade in the continual search to define one’s identity. It is this obsessive cult of the individual (among other things) that is interrogated, prodded and mercilessly skewered by Martin Crimp’s latest play.

It strikes me that the two key words that frame the piece – ‘republic’ and ‘happiness’ – seem in many ways to be internally opposed. So long as the quest for individual happiness continues to be sold to us as the ultimate goal of our existence, a goal to be pursued at the exclusion of all others, the possibility of cooperation is precluded and the true democracy implied by the concept of the ‘republic’ is rendered impossible. This can be read as the rotten truth buried beneath government happiness indexes and aspirational marketing speak; the tyranny of the individual is not one that frees us at all, but one that traps us in an isolating and self-perpetuating state of immobility, speaking in the same blithely inane circles as Crimp’s empty characters.

The play itself is divided into three distinct sections: ‘Destruction of the Family’, ‘The Five Essential Freedoms of the Individual’ and ‘In The Republic of Happiness’. Before delving into each of these, I’d suggest that the number of scenes feels significant, although the nature of this significance is uncertain. As Andrew Haydon touches on in his review, the number three invites numerous possible readings, with other critics positing the heaven, hell, purgatory trio (though I’d struggle to decide which section might be interpreted as which), while Andrew suggests that past, present and future works just as well. Vaguely linked to that chronological conception of the structure, I might add the traditional three-act play. For a piece that in many ways disrupts and deconstructs theatrical conventions from within, I suspect it’s no accident that it defers to and then explodes this most accepted of stage constructs.

The play also has the intriguing subtitle ‘an entertainment in three parts’, immediately summoning the inform/entertain binary and also begging the question of what exactly we find entertaining. We might further ask whether this production can indeed be classed as entertainment at all – it’s certainly very enjoyable in parts, but it’s hardly the comfortable viewing that we might normally associate with the traditional genre of ‘entertainment’. (As an aside, Dan Hutton interestingly suggests that the production has the quality of a “variety show where the theme is ‘what it means to be happy'”, pointing to the mixture of dramatic styles and the inclusion of songs as displaying a sort of vaudevillian influence)

As another brief preface to my discussion of the three sections, it feels necessary and helpful to set this production within its context. Showing at the Royal Court near the end of Dominic Cooke’s time as artistic director, there are a very specific set of implicit social, economic and artistic referents that frame the piece, which has a distinctly self-reflexive tint. The position of the theatre in Sloane Square’s bubble of privilege, its particular theatrical history and its typical audiences are all variously called to mind, as is Cooke’s frequently cited remit of exploring the position of the middle classes.

Which leads conveniently into the first section, ‘Destruction of the Family’, with its initial set-up recalling so many of the plays that have characterised Cooke’s artistic leadership of the theatre. At first glance, the scene conjures a typical (if slightly bare and a little unsettlingly red in colour) middle class dining room, furnished with a seemingly typical middle class family. Any notion of the ‘typical’ soon slips away as a superficial naturalism steadily crumbles, but the opening domestic image is quietly clever in its manipulation of audience expectations, as well as convincing me that Cooke (who has directed this piece) might just have a sense of humour about the supposed middle class obsession of his tenure.

The premise of this opening scene is a family Christmas dinner which is interrupted by the arrival of the apparently estranged Uncle Bob, whose appearance violently shatters a naturalism that has been gently eroding from the start. There’s a strain of heightened, compulsive truth-telling to the dialogue early on, quickly setting up a sense of dislocation, while the intrusion of a strange and unsettling song from the family’s two teenage daughters further arouses suspicions that all is not as it seems. Script and production both mark Uncle Bob’s entrance as a caesura, with the character’s assertion that “I thought I would just suddenly appear, so I did” and actor Paul Ready’s startling emergence from an invisible doorway both contributing to the sense Dan Rebellato articulates of this figure being a fictional construction abruptly summoned into being (which of course he is).

This initial aura of meta-theatrical fiction surrounding the character is reinforced later on. Uncle Bob’s reason for interrupting, he tells the family, is to inform them what his girlfriend Madeleine thinks of them all before the pair jet off to start a new life that is “like a pane of glass” – “Hard. Clear. Sharp. Clean”. While reeling off a litany of escalatingly vile insults, Bob says at one point: “you think I get pleasure from having to stay here and repeat what another person has instructed me to say?” While in one straightforward reading he is referring to the string-pulling off-stage presence of Madeleine, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is not also directed at the creative control of the playwright, an alternative reading that is enhanced in production by Ready’s implicit awareness and acknowledgement of the audience.

The breakdown of naturalism briefly outlined above, a process of collapse that begins from within, is eventually reflected in Miriam Buether’s design, as the noticeably flimsy walls of the room that contains the first section are pulled away – a visible dismantling. While this happens in the transition between the first and second sections, the cast line up facing the audience and very deliberately remove items of their costume – earrings here, a jacket there. It’s a calculated and conscious move, stripping away certain signifiers of character but letting other vestiges remain. What we are left with are figures who exist somewhere disturbingly between character and actor, acknowledging the ghosts of the characters they have just left behind and carrying these lingering spectres into the second segment of the show.

This is the longest and (at least in my experience) most enjoyable portion of the production. An excoriating satire, the section consists of, as announced in the title, ‘The Five Essential Freedoms of the Individual’: ‘The Freedom to Write the Script of My Own Life’, ‘The Freedom to Separate My Legs (It’s Nothing Political)’, ‘The Freedom to Experience Horrid Trauma’, ‘The Freedom to Put It All Behind Me and Move On’, and ‘The Freedom To Look Good & Live For Ever’. These take the form of a long stream of lines, which I later learned are completely up for grabs among the cast; each of the actors knows the entire thing and each night they were all free to take whichever lines they felt compelled to. This produces slippery and ever-shifting meanings, overlaying the words themselves with an engaging interplay between theatrical signifiers (how does this young female actor taking the line inflect it in a different way to an older male actor? what is the relationship between the words being spoken and the characters from the first act that have just been discarded?).

Crimp’s targets in this long (possibly over-long) section are many and varied: resolutely anti-political individualist rhetoric, the modern obsession with personal wellbeing, the fetishisation of trauma and recovery, the desire to control the story of one’s own life – all peppered with more specific references to modern day phenomena such as airport security checks and child medication, and broken up by a series of songs. It’s difficult throughout this stinging assault to pin down quite where Crimp himself (and by extension the whole production) stands, as the satire is quick to turn on the opposite viewpoint, upturning audience assumptions as fast as they form. (An example: “I don’t say I’m happy to separate my legs so that people who’ve been educated in a certain way or have particular beliefs can sit here in this audience and think that I mean the opposite – no way”. Ouch.)

The staging here, as Andrew suggests, is not particularly revelatory (he dubs it “The Path of Least Resistance”). Tugging at the unifying thread of the individual enshrined at the centre of contemporary culture, the organisation of the stage suggests the television chat show, with the cast lined up on clinical white chairs in front of a screen, while the mic-clutching performance style of the punctuating songs evokes the likes of The X Factor. This in itself might be telling; immediate associations are culturally revealing, in this instance speaking of the ubiquity of celebrity. This implicit context does, however, align readings in a certain way, whereas the lines as written on the page, without any direction or attribution, invite any number of different interpretations; much like seeing the Royal Court’s enjoyable but fairly unimaginative staging of Love and Information and subsequently reading Caryl Churchill’s startlingly open text, I was immediately itching to see someone else get their hands on it.

After thoroughly roasting our self-obsessed modern preoccupations, the middle section gives way to the final, most challenging segment of the production. Via an impressive scene transition during which a large white cube rises from beneath the stage, we return to Bob and Madeleine, who are now in an unspecified, antiseptic republic of which Bob appears to be the head – although it is once again Madeleine who pulls all the strings. Whereas prior to this the production gives us something to grasp onto, even if that something is a convention that cracks beneath our grip almost as soon as our fingers close around it, this concluding scene casts everything into doubt. This state of uncertainty goes right down to the design, which leaves an unsettling gap either side of the white cube in which Bob and Madeleine are standing, exposing the unattractive seams of the theatrical event and situating us in an unstable in-between territory, stranded somewhere that is not quite illusion yet not quite its opposite. Just as the middle section presents us with figures who hover between character and performer, theatrical conventions and signifiers cannot be relied upon.

On first watching it, I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of the closing scene, and I’m still not really sure about it. No characters inhabit the scene other than Bob and Madeleine and the minimal design seems calculated to give as few interpretive footholds as possible. We might assume that they have established the life that they dreamed of in the first scene – “like a pane of glass” – and it certainly seems to fulfil Madeline’s desire for a shallow surface shimmer, clean and shiny but devoid of depth. Though where exactly they are (other than, presumably, the unspecified ‘republic of happiness’) is anyone’s guess; Bob’s demand to know where the world has gone suggests that there might be nothing beyond the clinical cube they occupy, but I don’t have many other guesses to proffer. As has probably become clear, I struggled with this scene, and not necessarily in an enjoyable way. I think I probably agree with Andrew that it’s the sudden shift into total, almost impenetrable metaphor that is most frustrating and baffling about this gear change.

One possible way of reading this conclusion is as a critique of happiness itself. Dan Rebellato suggests that there is “something deeply banal about measuring fulfilment through happiness” and comes at the scene from this perspective, seeing happiness as a shallow category of experience. There certainly seems to be something in this when we look at Bob’s closing song, the ‘100% Happy Song’, an eerie and hollow tune that draws on nursery rhyme but drains the form of all its childish cheer. As Bob joylessly intones his final “oh hum hum hum the happy song”, it’s easy to agree with Dan that this last act “captures the thinness of a purely happy world”.

For me, despite my difficulties with interpreting the scene as a whole, its look and feel crystallized a certain set of ideas that can be identified running through the entire play. With its white finish and the flat, lifeless landscape of green visible through the large window, the set in this final scene has something of the Microsoft Windows interface to it, while the cube’s striking similarity to the design for Love and Information (also Buether’s, incidentally) immediately conjured for me that play’s attention to the digital information onslaught. Throughout In The Republic of Happiness, the characters seem to either inhabit or wish they inhabited a virtual world, one centred on the individual and logically cleansed of all life’s awkward complications – a defragmented existence. Madeleine wants to be able to select Bob’s family and click delete; there is talk of opening the document of one’s life; the lines of the middle section express a recurring obsession with fact, that most beloved item of the information age; the ‘100% Happy Song’ encourages listeners to “click on my smiling face”.

This entanglement with and desire for the digital experience seems wrapped up in the piece’s two other central concerns: the contrast between surface and depth and the pervading obsession with self. The screen is perhaps the ultimate expression of surface; not only shiny, hard and reflective, but also promising an existence that allows the destruction of depth, enabling users to delete files from their lives with just a click. Digital outlets also elevate the importance of the individual, offering each of us the possibility of transmitting a self-edited version of ourselves to the world. This extreme narcissism is most emphatically embodied in the figure of Madeleine, a character so wrapped up in herself that even her dress makes her feel like “I’m zipped into my own vagina”, and whose calculated, self-aware portrayal by the excellent Michelle Terry suggests an individual in love with the performance of her own life. Perhaps, we might conclude, it is the atomising force of our reliance on digital communication in the modern world that has engendered the cult of the individual that the play satirises, though I doubt Crimp’s diagnosis is quite that simple.

Inevitably, there’s a lot more that could be teased out from this production that I’ve barely touched on or that has emerged in reflection over the weeks since seeing it. One recurring element noted by Andrew that I hardly picked up on at all while watching is the repetition of references to child abduction and sexual abuse, though I’m not entirely convinced by Andrew’s suggestion that the structure of the play performs the function of “purging” Uncle Bob of hinted sexual crimes against his two nieces. I also felt the faint but looming shadow of environmental disaster hanging over the piece, lightly alluded to in teenager Debbie’s fear of the future, the family’s energy-saving removal of lightbulbs in the first scene and Granny’s premonition that humanity is on the brink of massive change; more of a background presence than a key concern, but one that has troubling implications for the narcissistic individualism at the play’s core, perhaps suggesting that our atomisation is key to our inability to cooperate in order to avert crisis.

Picking up on Bob’s stubborn insistence that “it goes deeper than that”, Dan Hutton proposes that this play also begs us as audience members and critics to go deeper, peeling away layers of meaning and theatricality. “No matter how much we think we ‘get it’,” he suggests, “we must continue to dig”. So essentially this is me attempting to excavate, to move beyond the surface and dig deeper. Though, despite all my interpretative efforts, it probably still goes a lot deeper than that.

A Love Letter

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Last night I fell a little bit in love.

But before I get onto that, there are a few things you should know. Uninvited Guests’ Love Letters Straight From Your Heart sounds, in many ways, like my vision of a nightmare: unapologetic sentimentality, public displays of emotion (emphatically not my thing – I was possibly the sole dry-eyed audience member when I went to see Lovesong) and, worst of all, the premise that in the room of the performance it is always Valentine’s Day. Whether single or in a relationship, the 14th February is a hideously over-commercialised day that I resolutely hate; one of my most vivid Valentine’s Day memories remains digging through stacks of saccharine, heart-studded cards in an increasingly frantic hunt for one to give my then boyfriend of only a couple of months that didn’t declare “I love you”.

Incongruously paired with this cynical, emotionally awkward streak of my personality, I had dangerously high expectations of the show. Everyone I’d spoken to about it had been in raptures, competing to express in superlatives just how much they loved it. And then, on top of all that, I’d been oddly compelled to write reams more than I probably should have done in my dedication (the piece is built around song dedications from audience members to loved ones – but more on that later) and was beginning to squirm at the thought of my nakedly sincere words falling from a performer’s mouth. All in all, the odds were in favour of me hating the whole experience.

And yet, in spite of all the above, I utterly adored it. The idea behind it all is simple enough: in advance of the show, audience members fill out dedications, requesting songs for their loved ones – partners, best mates, family members – and expressing what they mean to them; the performers then read these out and play the songs over the course of the evening, slotting them into a containing structure that gently explores the nature of love. It’s like an odd sort of marriage between participatory performance and Radio 2’s ‘Sunday Love Songs’, but one that strangely, charmingly works.

Entering the space, we’re offered a glass of sparkling wine and invited to take a place at one of two long tables facing one another. The aesthetic is cheap, familiar romance, all red tablecloths and roses, topped off with a glitterball suspended from the ceiling. There’s something of the wedding reception in the layout, an arrangement of the performance space that immediately cultivates the atmosphere of a social event rather than a theatrical one. It’s recognisable, unintimidating – an immediate setting at ease.

Once everyone is seated, performers Richard Dufty and Jess Hoffman take up their places at DJ desks at either end of the two long tables, from which they begin to spar with tunes, lobbing love songs at one another with grins and rolls of the eyes. There’s cheese and passion and raw, piercing heartbreak. But the bared soul of the show, as the songs played by Dufty and Hoffman melt into those selected by audience members, is formed by the dedications of those present. Like me, other audience members (at least on the night I went) seem emboldened by the setting to open their hearts, to share mushy declarations of love or friendship or to wrench out private pain. The company’s description of the atmosphere as something between a wedding and a wake is deeply apt, with both devotion and loss foregrounded, while the space itself shares that loosening of emotions that accompanies these rare events when we allow ourselves to unreservedly feel.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that we are all listening in to the voicing of emotions usually confined to the sphere of the private, Love Letters refuses to cast its audience as voyeurs. There is a sense that we must all give up something of ourselves, all equally drop a barrier that leaves us startlingly level with one another. The most striking way in which this is achieved is through an instruction for audience members to gaze into the eyes of the person opposite them for the duration of Johnny Cash’s ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, creating an unsettling intimacy that somehow shifts something in the room (if the effect sounds exaggerated, try looking into someone’s eyes for the length of that song; it’s extraordinarily, revealingly difficult). There is, as a result, a sense of the collective, a half-community that will dissolve once we step out of the space but for a brief time reconfigures social rules (again, this looks hyperbolic and cliched as I write it, but I was struck by the way in which people easily spoke to one another after the performance, an ease between strangers that I’ve rarely witnessed in a theatre context).

Central to it all is the music. A shifting playlist that changes every night, the songs are intimately tied up with memories, but these aren’t just restricted to the memories of the individual who has made each request. As we listen to The Smiths, Kate Bush, Joy Division, Elvis, Soft Cell, almost every track unleashes a torrent of my own recollections, conjuring other loved ones with the breathless exhilaration of teenage infatuation or the comfort and warmth of the family home. It also made me think of all the other theatrical moments that are inseparably wedded to particular pieces of music (the trio of extraordinary visual snapshots that accompany ‘Wicked Game’, ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘The Last Living Rose’ in Three Kingdoms, the techno underscoring of Beats, the glorious, vodka-fuelled rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in Benedict Andrews’ Three Sisters, plus lots more I can’t quite summon to mind right now), performance memories that pulse with a soundtrack.

There’s a part of me, that niggling, questioning, slightly cynical part, that wants to problematise what Uninvited Guests are doing; to prod at the notion of sincerity within a theatrical frame that is implicitly supported by insincerity and artifice, to raise a skeptical eyebrow at the idea of “liveness” – a word bound up with so many uninterrogated complexities – uniting a group of strangers in a dimly lit room with a shared promise of love. That part of me, however, is overcome by the urge to surrender to the seduction, to believe in the simple beauty of the piece’s premise. At some point, much like with falling in love, there is a moment of giving in, of trusting. And maybe that impulse to give in is exactly what makes Love Letters the gorgeous, giddy, emotionally puncturing experience that it is.

Pausing the Playlist: Reflections on D&D8

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

This is a column that almost didn’t happen. Stepping out of the pub far later than intended after my first experience of Devoted & Disgruntled, head full to the brim with provocations and projects, the weekend struck me as impossible to write about. The very set-up of the event, cultivating an atmosphere of gentle, creative anarchy, resists being wrestled into any kind of structure. But one suggestion, voiced in the dying moments of the second day as a microphone slowly passed around the wide circle of people gathered in York Hall, seems a fittingly optimistic place to start. Theatremaker Tom Spencer had the idea of a D&D playlist: a collectively assembled set of songs that inspire us, motivate us, make us want to make things. The spirit of D&D captured and set to a beat.

Thinking about it over the past week, the contribution I’ve finally found myself settling on is ‘This Is Radio Clash’. Partly because I nurture a fierce and long-held love for The Clash, partly because it’s the song that nudges me out of the house in the early morning, blaring through my earphones as I negotiate the commuter-clogged Overground. But also partly for the line that always shouts out loudest: “can we get that world to listen?” Because it feels as though that’s what D&D is about: listening. An exchange in which our opinions on theatre are not simply stated, but involved in a true dialogue, a back and forth that involves as much listening as speaking; more listening, sometimes, for those like me perched sponge-like at the edge of discussions, absorbing different perspectives and ideas.

Beginning with this playlist feels doubly apt, because music repeatedly and perhaps surprisingly interweaved with theatre across the two days that I attended. With dozens of sessions called (the event’s Open Space format allows for anyone to propose a subject for discussion) it’s somewhat futile to trace journeys through the event, as these will differ vastly from individual to individual, each beating their own track. Even to fully retread my own track would take much more than the space I have here. Yet music felt like a recurring comparison, making a refreshingly outward looking reference point against which we in theatre might measure what we’re doing. It’s sometimes vital to remember, equally in practice and in criticism, that theatre exists alongside and in a horizontal relation to other art forms, from which it might feed and learn.

From parallels with the heady joy of discovery on the music scene and how this might be reflected in the variety of the fringe, to touring models and performing at festivals, the comparison became a repeatedly fruitful one over the weekend. Witnessing the crossover with other live culture in this way, it strikes me that it’s worth giving greater thought to the space in which these live encounters take place. As Maddy Costa pointed out in one session, we’re good at shouting about why people should come to the theatre, but we rarely try taking it to them; perhaps we should look instead to the model of live music (and comedy) in pubs and bars, inhabiting a recognisable social space. There was also the appealing suggestion that, in the same way that bands have supporting acts, theatre shows might open with snippets or scratches from emerging companies – though the problematic label of “emerging” was itself a matter of debate elsewhere, as we collectively tussled with the definitions we deploy and the effects these have.

While mired in these and other knotty thoughts from the first day, I happened on Saturday night to read Andrew Haydon’s blog on Marxism and Theatre, in which he too points to a connection with music, specifically in terms of the classlessness implied by the gig. In doing so, he mentions Simon Stephens, whose writing is so often drenched in music, and who spoke in a recent interview about how his love for theatre was born from a realisation that it could incorporate the “edgy live-ness of a gig”. I have my reservations about this idea of “liveness” – it’s a word that we all throw around a lot without really interrogating what we mean by it and that has gained an extra fetishised appeal in a digital world that so often eschews the live, real life encounter – but I can’t help feeling there’s the grain of something truthful in it.

There is, after all, something undeniably appealing about the live, something thrilling enough to entice music fans to part with their money when they could just as easily listen to the same tracks at home for free. What we buy into when we go to a gig is the idea of the unpredictable and the unique, the idea that no other performance will ever be quite like this, that this exact group of people will never again be gathered in the same room together – that there’s something special about simply being there. The best gigs – those not in massive, soulless arenas – also have something of a levelling effect, an effect that I think can be exaggerated and romanticised, but that does go much further in eroding divisions than auditoriums where it’s clear who has paid the most to be there.

Which all sounds a lot like the most exciting and inspiring theatre I go to see. And which also, incidentally, sounds quite a bit like D&D itself; the lack of structure and hierarchy, the element of unpredictability, the mantra that whoever comes are the right people.

This is not to view the weekend from behind entirely rose-tinted glasses. In a world and an industry so often governed by structure and convention, I’ll admit that the free movement and intellectual curiosity fostered by the respectful chaos of D&D can be oddly bewildering. Despite the signs taped up around the room reminding us of the “law of two feet”, it took me most of the first day to acclimatise to the idea that moving on from a session is not a sign of rudeness, in much the same way as I doubt I’ll ever be able to walk out of a theatre show. The freedom to flit from group to group can also be torturously tantalising, offering too many fascinating discussions to settle on one and throwing up missed or half-heard sessions – like those on the notion of artist as parasiteand the desire for more European theatre – that immediately prompt the wish for a time-turner.

But while some sessions felt frustratingly formless – frustrating for me, that is, hence using my two feet to get more usefully involved elsewhere – the overwhelming atmosphere was one of motivation for change, dismissing criticisms that the event is all talk and no action. Perhaps that has something to do with the enforced urgency of the present moment; whatever the reason, session after session that I sat in on over the weekend resulted in solid commitments to begin driving towards the change that was so passionately discussed. And change is, again, tied up with that vital act of listening, of tuning in to another’s rhythm, pausing as we skip through the playlist. Can we get that world to listen? If theatre is to have any hope of getting others to pay attention, it seems essential that we first find a way of listening to one another.