The One, Soho Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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“It’s kind of funny. And it’s kind of sad.” These are the words of Harry, one half of the nightmarish pairing at the centre of Vicky Jones’ prickly debut play, but they might as well act as a strapline for this story of vicious lovers. That blend of the bitter and the hilarious, along with its uneasy ambivalence, neatly characterises Jones’ narrative of two individuals who are terrifyingly adept at pushing one another’s buttons. It’s equal parts side-splitting and jaw-dropping (not necessarily in a good way) to watch, repeatedly juxtaposing giggles and winces, all the while underscored with the sense of something queasily problematic.

It’s clear from the start that the piece – particularly as directed here by Steve Marmion – is out to ruthlessly skewer romantic cliches. After sitting through a medley of cheesy love songs while the rest of the audience file into the space, the lights go down to reveal a star-studded backdrop at the rear of Anthony Lamble’s minimal living room set, and the opening strains of “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera (a show with a dubious romantic hero if ever there was one) usher on Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Rufus Wright as couple Jo and Harry. The pair embrace, only for the Hollywood romance to abruptly give way to a perfunctory, joyless fuck. Porn plays in the background and Jo throws Wotsits into her mouth.

Given the scenario and the distinctive, charismatic presence of Waller-Bridge, comparisons with Fleabag – the performer’s fearlessly filthy solo show, directed by Jones – immediately invite themselves. This might as well be one of the countless sexual encounters described in that show, where the addition of Wotsits would be one of the least surprising aspects of its catalogue of promiscuity. And like Fleabag, The One insistently pushes at the boundaries of acceptability. It has a “did they really just say that?” quality about it, not to mention the same razor-sharp comedy, impeccably delivered by the ever-extraordinary Waller-Bridge. Yet, while Fleabag also traded on discomfort and fired out laughs that quickly soured in the mouth, there is something altogether more knotty and unsettling about The One.

The action of the piece is claustrophobically confined to the one room, in what could be seen as a jaded, ironic take on the drawing-room comedy. Waiting up for news of the impending birth of Jo’s niece, the bored couple tease, taunt and torment one another, occasionally including Harry’s friend, colleague and old flame Kerry in their sparring. Both Harry and Jo are fiercely intelligent, each using their frustrated intellect and intimate knowledge of the other to push at their limits. The gender politics are complicated by the knotty student/teacher relationship between the pair: English professor Harry is ten years Jo’s senior and taught her at university, suggesting that something lightly exploitative – or at the very least illicit – was in play right from the beginning.

Harry and Jo’s interactions throughout the play, which takes place across the one night, explore varying levels of transgression within relationships. How far would you go to hurt the other person? And how far is too far? There are repeated, rapid descents from playfulness into something far less savoury, testing that delicate tipping point between OK and not OK. It is clear that they both derive a perverse pleasure from abusing one another; at one point Kerry asks “who wants to live like this?”, but evidently they do. Their relationship is a constant competition, in which both of them are desperate to win.

Too often, however, the effect of all this back and forth – no matter how witty – is the sense of a series of rehearsed arguments and provocations. There is a flavour of the thought experiment to certain scenes, with the characters acting merely as ciphers. This is not to say that the theatre is not a place for thought experiments, but when conversation progresses onto a troubling preoccupation with rape – replete with the sort of rape jokes that abound in lad culture – the emptiness of its musings becomes seriously problematic. The play, like its characters, is interested in button-pushing, but I wonder if ultimately it takes its tactics a little too far without offering anything to justify them.

I suspect that a good portion of this ambivalence and discomfort is as much a product of Marmion’s production as it is of the play that Jones has written (although that suspicion, of course, depends on a potentially disingenuous separation of the two). Other than standing it up on stage, Marmion does little to engage with or interrogate the stickier aspects of the piece, and the interventions he does make feel odd and uneven. The aforementioned skewering of romance (the stars, the music, the low lighting between scenes) is an obvious choice, but one that is increasingly out of step with the play. This is clearly about far more than simply unmasking the sham of a particular idea of romantic love. The half-heartedly choreographed movement between scenes is painfully awkward in its sort-of-abstract suggestions of erotic game-playing and sexual violence, while some unnecessary pouring away of wine and fiddling with clock hands seems calculated to do little more than inform us that time has passed.

Meanwhile, as unfailingly brilliant as Waller-Bridge may be, I’m not sure that casting her in this play – which, even without seeing the note in the script, we might quickly deduce has been written for her – is entirely helpful. For a start, it makes that connection with Fleabag, through the lens of which Jones’ play is then inevitably viewed. And then, because of that unbearable yet electric quality that she brings to the role, the character of Jo dominates the stage; it becomes her show. Of course this is partly down to the fact that Jones has written the piece with Waller-Bridge in mind, but it would be fascinating to see what a different actress might bring to that central dynamic. Along with different direction, it might also allow the play to breathe a little more.

Seeing as comparisons with Fleabag are unavoidable, there is one more that feels worth drawing. The real kick in the guts of that piece was the way in which its humour attacked the audience. We laughed – great big guffaws of laughter – and then caught ourselves in the act of laughing, made suddenly aware of just what it was we were laughing at. We were made to feel complicit. The One reaches for the same reaction, but comes up a little short. There’s still unease, certainly, and the laughter is still barbed, but it feels as though we are let off the hook slightly. If that sharp humour and thorny complicity is the aim of the game, it needs to be executed a little more cleverly than it is here.

Yet despite all my uncertainty about – and in some cases anger towards – the play, I can’t just go ahead and dismiss it. The One has, for better or worse, lodged itself in my brain, still picking away two days later. It certainly has something to say, or some provocation to make, even if I can’t quite pin it down. Perhaps its slipperiness, its very resistance to being pinned down, is preciously the point.

I also find myself wondering if it’s trying to do something smarter than I’ve given it credit for. One of the most striking things about its resolutely unpleasant characters is the extent to which they are fixated on individual desires. Which makes me reflect that the title might refer not so much to “The One” in the mystical sense of one’s soulmate (though this is clearly one inference), but to the isolated number, the atomised modern individual. I’m reminded, via Andy Field, of the quote from writer and director René Pollesch: “I would like to talk to the capitalists about money, but they only wanted to tell love stories”. The One is not a love story – not in any traditional sense, anyway – but it is a damning display of the way in which the constant pursuit of and obsession with love and sex are intimately tied up with a society which places focus firmly on the self. Jo and Harry, locked into their hermetically sealed relationship, are perfect portraits of apathy; they barely leave the house, they don’t know where their lives are going, they are so bored that all they can think to do is tear strips off one another. This, perhaps, is where an obsession with “The One” – in both senses of that phrase – ultimately leads.

Happy Days, Young Vic

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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“The function of utopia is a critique of what is present.” – Ernst Bloch

I find myself thinking a lot about utopia, optimism, hope and idealism, as well as theatre’s place in that matrix of positivity. Perhaps it’s because, at heart, I think I’m an essentially optimistic person. As an optimist (most of the time) and as a theatre lover, it’s unsurprising that I invest the theatre I see with the possibility of hope, however small. Whether it’s Jill Dolan’s infectiously passionate Utopia in Performance, which greeted me like an embrace after weeks of burying myself in theory which all seemed to disavow theatre’s radical and optimistic potential, or the hopeful striking of a match at the end of Lucy Ellinson’s border ballad, it’s those slivers of optimism which always catch my attention.

Predictably, then, I was struck by that opening quotation from Ernst Bloch. It dragged my mind back to a discussion that Dan Hutton and I had on Exeunt a few months ago, in which we jumped off from Andrew Haydon’s (slightly disingenuous) positing of hope and critique as two sides of a dichotomy, opening into a consideration of hope in the theatre we were seeing at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. One of our shared conclusions was that there can in fact be critique within a hopeful narrative, a point that Bloch’s statement succinctly nails. The same, I think, might be said of discourses steeped in optimism. Just as utopian thought can function as critique, so too perhaps can optimism.

The scorched world of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days is clearly not a utopia of any description. Indeed, it would not be much of a stretch to describe it as a dystopia. In Natalie Abrahami’s new production at the Young Vic, the striking prison of earth in which Winnie is trapped is less a mound of sand and more an inhospitable, rapidly eroding rock face, sloping sharply down towards the audience. Within Beckett’s demanded limitations, Vicki Mortimer’s design draws out both the precarious nature of Winnie’s predicament and the yearning, upwards movement that pulls in vain against her cruel, unexplained confinement. Add to this sound designer Tom Gibbons’ chillingly discordant “bell”, slicing Winnie’s time into regimented portions of waking and sleeping – not to mention the encroaching possibility that the sand will soon completely bury her – and it looks like a fairly hopeless situation. So what are we to make of Winnie’s stubborn optimism?

Optimism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be defined in two distinct ways. The first, more commonly used definition is hopefulness in a forward-looking sense; the placing of hope in a future outcome. The second definition, however, is the belief that “this world is the best of all possible worlds” – optimism grounded in the here and now. By this definition, as I look around at the grim state of the world we presently live in, I would class as a pessimist. Winnie, however, with her repeated, irrationally cheery “this will have been a happy day”, is an optimist by any definition.

Or is she? Her refrain, significantly, is “this will have been a happy day”, not “this is a happy day”. The happiness is always contingent, always deferred. This statement is often followed, after a pause, by the qualification “so far”, again haunting her contentment with the spectre of future calamities (unsurprisingly, one might argue, given the ever-present threat of suffocation by sand). Time itself is manipulated throughout the play, as in much of Beckett’s work, further complicating matters. Winnie seems, at certain points, to have destroyed the notion of change and the passage of time as a sort of coping mechanism. She insists, illogically, that “nothing has occurred”; even when her umbrella bursts into flame, she calmly observes that it will be back in its old place by tomorrow. Yet there is a definite routine to the way she lives out her days, and a habitual gesturing to both past and future. Her experience of time is less a stretched out, purgatorial present as it is a fluid, mutable marker of existence, and thus her brittle optimism cannot find a firm foundation in any tense.

Juliet Stevenson’s remarkable performance in the Young Vic’s production highlights every last nuance of Winnie’s complex, ambivalent relationship with optimism. Her first expression is an almost grotesque grimace of joy, her face stretching to form a strained mask. There is, proceeding from this moment, a certain deliberateness to Stevenson’s movements, at times becoming an almost mechanical precision. Held static, the thwarted physicality of the rest of her body is channelled through her arms, which she holds like those of a dancer. Each calculated flick of a finger seems invested with some unspoken emotion.

There is something similarly deliberate about Stevenson’s speech – appropriately, for a woman whose existence balances hazardously on words. There is always an effortful edge to her insistent pronouncement of the word “wonderful”, while another of her stock phrases, “the old style”, veers in delivery from cheery to wistful to mournful, eventually becoming stained with desperation. One of Stevenson’s great skills is her ability to load words with heavy yet never overstated meaning; “wife”, rolling laboriously from her lips, is invested with multiple accusations, sighs and hopes. At other times, by contrast, there is an ironic relish to her sentences and a wry ring to her laugh. Out of the bleak, Beckettian gloom, Stevenson’s humour glints brightly.

The overwhelming impression created by Stevenson’s performance is of a woman assaulted by feeling yet grimly determined to remain in control. Her delicate, virtuosic hopping from emotion to emotion is always wrenched back to a dogged cheerfulness, as she fixes her smile with the same care that she fixes her hat. Even her crying is contained, her hands pressing tears back into her eyes. Winnie’s optimism, at least in this production, is not blind or ignorant, nor is it the babbling of a woman who has lost her mind. Optimism emerges as a choice, but it is an unstable one. It has to be worked at.

The more I think about it, the more Winnie’s optimism (if indeed optimism the right word) feels like an apt comment on the situation we find ourselves caught in, particularly at this present moment. Returning to those two definitions, the optimism that many of us feel right now is firmly future tense. We believe, or at least we hope, that things will one day be better; therein lies the critique, as for the situation to improve it must first be flawed in some way. Yet to get by from day to day we, like Winnie, must find some optimism in the present. The system thereby bends us towards the second definition of optimism and the acceptance that ours is “the best of all possible worlds”. Unable to fully resign ourselves to this, perhaps we also hover somewhere between the two, determinedly injecting our lives with cheer and deferring, along with conflicted Winnie, our own happy days.

For another consideration of optimism in Happy Days, see Dan Hutton’s essay. 

Photo: Johan Persson.

The Body of an American, Gate Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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At the time I saw Chimerica last year, I found myself preoccupied with the idea of the photographic image. A play that promised – in its very title, no less – to be about the relationship between China and America struck me as having many more interesting things to say about the nature of the image and the knotty ethics of photojournalism. Not long after, I read both Susan Sontag’s essays on photography and Vivienne Franzmann’s 2012 play The Witness, which also folds its dramatic possibilities outwards from an image taken in the midst of violence. All ask interconnected questions. What is the currency – both economic and political – of images? What does it mean to bear witness? And is to observe to also and inevitably turn away from intervention?

Repeating those questions, The Body of an American might now be added to Chimerica and The Witness to form a fascinating trio of twenty-first-century plays with photojournalists at their hearts. Like the other two shows, Dan O’Brien’s tense, muscular play is concerned with the haunting legacy of a famous image – as well as much else besides. Taking as its starting point the long email correspondence between the playwright and his subject, Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson, the play painfully dissects the psychological damage of Watson’s work and the personal demons of both men. While there’s certainly something to be written about the relationship between this, Chimerica and The Witness (and indeed the renewed interest that might have provoked all three plays), The Body of an American alone offers so much to process that it feels necessary to narrow the lens for the time being. So where to start?

There is, first of all, an intriguing relationship with authenticity that is persistently pointed to by the Gate’s production. Even before the performance begins, The Body of an American prompts us to engage with questions of veracity. On filing into the claustrophobic, snow-lined bunker that designer Alex Lowde has constructed inside the Gate’s already intimate theatre, our attention is immediately drawn to the two screens bookending the space, both projected with the same statement that everything we are about to see and hear was produced or captured by O’Brien or Watson. At the outset, the show very deliberately announces both its truth and the vantage points from which that truth is to be told.

What becomes clear as the piece unfolds is that the play has been constructed from a combination of the two men’s words, drawing on their long email correspondence, their eventual meeting in the Arctic, and other documentary materials. This is all compellingly delivered by just two performers: William Gaminara as “Paul” and Damien Molony as “Dan”, with both also standing in as the large cast of supporting characters (although Gaminara and Molony effectively portray Watson and O’Brien respectively, they are of course distanced representations of real people, so let’s just assume the quotation marks from here on in). The Body of an American is, essentially, a verbatim show.

And yet O’Brien has sculpted his own form of documentary theatre from these many fragments. The story he originally wanted to tell was that of Watson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who has documented atrocities across the world. O’Brien was drawn to Watson while attempting to write a play about ghosts; Watson, the haunted man, became his new subject. What The Body of an American has turned into, however, is a play documenting the process of documentary theatre, jumping frenetically between emails, conversations, recordings and reflections. The text is lyrical but dense, its restless movement demanding total concentration from an audience.

As well as continually hopping about, the whole thing constantly gestures to its own construction, telling its audience as much about O’Brien’s efforts to write it as it does about the life of the man he has attempted to put on stage. In this way, The Body of an American deftly sidesteps the more problematic elements of verbatim theatre. Despite that initial declaration of authenticity – which I suspect is as much to train the audience’s minds on the idea of authenticity as it is to reassure us of the show’s truth – there is no question of obscuring the process of editing in an effort to pretend to absolute, unmediated truth. The play is, unapologetically, just one version of reality.

The same might be said, rather aptly, of a photograph. Photographic images purport to be snapshots of the truth, images of reality, but someone always has to frame them, to isolate that particular moment in time and decide that it is worth capturing. Paul’s words even refer to this. The most important photograph in the play is the one that sealed his success and his torment, both winning him the Pulitzer Prize and haunting him for life. In the moment of taking the infamous image, which shows a US soldier’s battered corpse on a street in Mogadishu, he talks about framing it better, about getting the right shot. Part of what tortures Paul throughout, perhaps, is the disconnect between the truth he endlessly seeks and the artificiality of how he tries to capture it.

For all that the show’s content is dark, disturbing and infected with a pervasive sense of melancholy, James Dacre’s production delivers this difficult material with a sharp kick of adrenaline. The pace rattles furiously along, sweeping its audience up in the same addictive thrill that keeps Paul doing what he does. In this way, the production is very good at complicatedly recognising both the compulsive excitement of Paul’s work and the gnawing depression that is, the piece implies, both a symptom and a cause of his chosen career. As the show goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the same deadening sorrow eats away at Dan; there are moments when a chilling, identical look of desolation pours out of both Gaminara’s and Molony’s eyes.

As much as anything, it occurs to me about halfway through, The Body of an American is about relationships between men. The strange yet moving central friendship between Dan and Paul is the most obvious of these, but their respective relationships with the men in their families loom large, as does Paul’s unbreakable link with the ghost of the man he ironically immortalised. It is often the damage of these male relationships that binds Dan and Paul closer together, linked by their common losses and their struggle with normative ideas of masculinity. In their depression, their loneliness and their retreat from society, the two men seem more and more alike; two broken individuals in a broken world.

On reflection, it strikes me that the photojournalists in Chimerica and The Witness are also male – perhaps not without reason. All three photojournalists, real and fictional, are observing from a position of white male privilege; their gaze is especially problematic because of the troubling power balance between watcher and watched. In his review, Andrew Haydon brilliantly articulates the significance of choice in the situations depicted by the play, which he argues is a central characteristic of privilege itself. The privileged choose to look on wars and atrocities, to seek them out and capture them for the eyes of people living on the other side of the world. Those caught up in the midst of conflict or disaster simply have nowhere else to look.

The tight, intelligent layout of Dacre’s production also makes an audience’s gaze loaded. Those all-important screens at either end of the performance space play host to projections throughout the show, showing harrowing selections from Paul’s back catalogue of warzone horrors. Because of their positioning, these images never directly confront us, meaning that – like Paul – we have to very deliberately look if we want to comprehend the images in question. Though, actually, this isn’t quite true. There is a choice involved in looking at the photographs full-on, in all their horror, but the haunting fact of their presence is unavoidable, flickering away at the peripheries of our vision. Like the tightly packed ideas in the play, they dance around the edges, framing the electrifying action at the centre of the piece.

As well as the obvious comparisons to be made with Chimerica and The Witness, Andrew links The Body of an American with Grounded, another Gate show that was equally electric, equally intelligent and equally concerned with America. I’d argue that it also demands to be considered alongside No Place to Go, the third production in a season that the theatre pointedly framed with ideas of work and modern American identity. Despite their differences (and No Place to Go is in most respects very different to the other two productions), what I found myself taking away from all three shows was their deep sense of loss – a loss often stained with bitter disillusionment. Which, taken as a collective statement, seems to say a lot about the USA, our external perspective on it and the modern world more widely. A grim image indeed.

P.S. I will, one day, write the essay I have simmering away about photography, photojournalism and the ethics of the image in The Body of an American, Chimerica and The Witness …

Photo: Tristram Kenton.

The Reimagined Flâneur

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

I wrote the below a few months ago to enter into the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. Needless to say, it didn’t get shortlisted, but I thought I might as well post it here.

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Framing his iconic portrait of the flâneur, that emblematic figure of urban life, Charles Baudelaire described him as a “passionate spectator” – an individual of feeling, but one who remains detached from the crowd even as he moves within it. For Baudelaire, it is the fate of the flâneur “to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world”. Today, fighting one’s way through swarming city streets where every last move is inscribed on CCTV footage, it is a struggle to conjure up Baudelaire’s leisured man of the crowd, or even Walter Benjamin’s alienated urban onlooker. For 21st-century would-be flâneurs, walking is less an activity than an obstacle course.

In the midst of this relentless urban clamour, Rosana Cade’s Walking:Holding extends a fresh invitation to stroll and observe. In joining Cade’s journey, however, we are denied the cool, detached voyeurism of the flâneur. In common with the demands of Baudelaire, this is a piece that asks us to pause, to walk without purpose, to consider our surroundings. But at the heart of Walking:Holding, on the opposite side of its central pairing, is a provocation to engage.

Cade’s premise is simple: her one-to-one, site-responsive performance pairs each individual audience member with a series of strangers, with whom they are asked to hold hands as they walk through the streets. The piece has been mounted in various different towns and cities – most recently London – with different local performers, reconfigured each time to slot into its new urban context. In this sense, more so than much other work that masquerades under the same label, it truly is responding to its surroundings, moulding itself around the new city it finds itself in.

Simple though Walking:Holding may be, however, it is also a knot of contradictions. It offers up intimacy, but within safe boundaries; it demands engagement, yet in the same movement disengages its hand-holding couples from the city around them; it suggests common experience, while simultaneously acknowledging difference. It is as complex and paradoxical as the city itself, with its ever-growing crowds and ever-increasing atomisation. The bright lights of the urban playground promise countless possible encounters, but frequently offer nothing but loneliness.

In contrast with this idea of loneliness, it is the act of hand-holding itself that becomes the first object of attention in my own lingering stroll around sun-drenched East London. The conversations that unfold with each of my partners are gently, almost imperceptibly guided, steering me towards my own attitudes to intimacy. “When did you last hold hands?” one performer asks, his fingers reassuringly entwined with mine. As I offer my answer, another contradiction occurs, between the physical act of holding hands and the emotional closeness it represents. For such a basic form of contact, it can be taken to mean a hell of a lot.

Despite all this personal reflection, the performance casts its gaze outward as well as inward. Cade asks us to look and be looked at; to open our eyes to the visual richness of the city and imagine how we are painted within it. The first hand-holder of the performance is Cade herself, who shares her experience of coming out in her small hometown and the discomfort she felt when holding hands publicly with her first girlfriend. From this anecdote onwards, considerations of sexuality and its perception are implicit within the walk, which places participants in a variety of different gender pairings. Holding hands variously with a woman, a man, a transvestite, I am silently invited to consider how my image is altered by being physically linked to these individuals, and how this in turn might shift my own perspective on familiar city scenes.

To this end, the route that Cade has meticulously crafted incorporates a number of reflective surfaces, from shimmering office block windows to smudged pub mirrors. Our manufactured couples blink back at us, challenging the way we see both ourselves and those around us by making our own reflection somehow other. It feels contrived, sometimes nigglingly so, but to powerful effect. With a slightly transformed view of oneself, the wider view also mutates, like turning the dial on a kaleidoscope. The streets and its inhabitants come under new, more imaginative scrutiny, extended with empathy rather than suspicion.

Remapping cityscapes is hardly a new concern for artists; urban audio tours and promenade performances have been doing it for years, often hand in hand with the fashion for psychogeography. Here, however, this strategy of urban re-landscaping functions with fresh effect because it works at the level of the personal, rippling outwards from the two clasped hands at its centre. With each new partner and turning onto each new street, we encounter a different version of ourselves and – as a consequence – of the world we construct around us.

Theatre that demands its audience members to take a more active role, from the immersive landscapes of Punchdrunk or Shunt to the startling intimacy of one-to-one performance, has become somewhat ubiquitous. Often the objective of these shows is to activate theatregoers, to make them a vital part of the performance in a way that recruits more than just their imaginations. Walking:Holding, however, is less an invitation to perform than it is an invitation to recognise that we are always already performing, always presenting edited versions of ourselves to the world. The only person Cade asks us to perform is ourselves, at which we are all practiced masters.

And here, perhaps, is where we return to the flâneur. Baudelaire’s detached artist-poet, his invisible man of the crowd, paints the heaving metropolis while erasing himself from the picture. His own performance is one of obscurity – though, admittedly, the stereotypical image of the aloof flâneur leading his tortoise on a leash through the arcades of Paris is about as theatrical as they come.

Cade, however, does not allow participants this self-erasure. The flâneur – who is, after all, a figure of the 19th and early 20th century rather than a contemporary reference point – is never an explicit influence for the performance, but the enduring intellectual fascination with this figure sits somewhere beneath its quiet contemplation of intimacy, sexuality and public space. By revealing us as a performer in the city, our new variation on the flâneur is allowed to be at once an observer and an actor, carrying with it the possibility of action as well as engagement.

This recalls another performance artist, Jenna Watt, whose Edinburgh Fringe show last year made deliberate use of Baudelaire via Benjamin. Flâneurs reflected on modern street violence and the bystander effect, appropriating the image of the flâneur as a route into an examination of what stops us from intervening. We are all guilty of crossing the road to avoid trouble, of failing to step in when perhaps we should have done, but why?

As Watt recognised, the danger of Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s flâneur is that his required distance removes his ability to engage with, intervene in and therefore change the world he observes. He is painted over, allowing his brush only to reflect the outlines he sees. Walking:Holding, by placing human contact and self-performance at its heart, returns us to the picture.

Hippo World Guest Book, Caryl Churchill Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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It’s a bit of a bold statement, but I think Chris Goode’s Hippo World Guest Book might just be the best piece of theatre to be made about the internet to date. Except, strictly speaking, it’s not actually about the internet at all – at least, not in any straightforward sense. As Goode tells us at the beginning of the show, none of the words in the main body of the piece are his; apart from the pre-recorded introduction, he has not written any of what is about to be performed. Instead of sitting down at a blank word document and trying to tackle the unruly behemoth that is our online world, Goode has borrowed from it. He doesn’t comment on the internet as much as comment from it.

The vast majority of the text in the show comes from the eponymous Hippo World Guest Book, which is exactly what it sounds like: an online guest book on a website for (surprisingly vociferous) hippo fans. Left unmoderated, this web page is a fascinating microcosm of online commenting culture, beginning in a spirit of giddy optimism but quickly beginning to sour. Goode has edited down hundreds of pages worth of comments into a one hour slice of highlights, though he’s clear that each individual comment has not been meddled with in any way. What we hear is exactly how the commenters wanted to express themselves – a thought that is, as Goode points out, quite extraordinary to reflect on at certain points.

In his little preamble – the introduction to the introduction, if you will – Goode tells us that he stumbled across Hippo World and its oddly compelling guest book by accident, but the subject of the comments he goes on to read feels significant. Or rather, it is significant because of its insignificance. I can think of few things more innocuous than a fan site for, on the face of it, a pretty uncontroversial animal. Because of this innocuousness, the subsequent bile of the trolls who begin to occupy the site is all the more startling, while the lack of any meaningful connection to politics or world events makes it a strikingly pure metaphor for internet behaviour. Where Theatre State’s choice of forum topic (arts funding) in A Lesson on the Benefits of Being a Troll felt a little manipulative, the benign indifference that I suspect most audiences feel towards hippos functions to focus attention on the intent of the comments rather than their specific content (I may be wrong here; my fellow audience members might have had extremely strong opinions about hippos).

The arrangement of the space and Goode’s performance within it also feel important. There’s a very low-fi aesthetic to the piece – so low-fi, in fact, that it would be easy not to think of it as an aesthetic at all, just to accept it as a man reading from a stand. To the side of where Goode reads from the guest book, there is a small table arrayed with a hippo stuffed toy, a candle and a framed photo of Hippo World’s founder. These are all produced, along with the guest book (actual printed pages slotted into a plastic file), from a pretty unassuming Morrisons bag. The candle is lit at the start of the performance, as the recorded, storybook style introduction outlines the utopian beginnings of Hippo World, and remains gently flickering away until the guest book finally becomes a neglected wasteland of casino spam.

There’s something deeply melancholy about this journey from optimism to antagonism to a void occupied only by advertising. It is, of course, a metaphor for the web – and a particularly powerful one in the midst of renewed concerns about Twitter abuse – but it also feels like something of a sad allegory for all of our utopian endeavours. This sense of melancholy is underlined throughout by Goode’s extraordinary performance; even as it is properly laugh-out-loud, tears-streaming-down-the-face funny (and it is very, very funny), there is a subtle underlying layer of sadness, a heavy knowledge of what is to come. Goode takes on the sighing character of a god watching his creations rip one another to shreds, as if he knew all along that it could only end this way. But then there is also such gentle care in the presentation of passion and hope – even if it comes in the form of “I LOVE HIPPOS!!” – hinting that perhaps things could be different, perhaps there is something in the attempt to carve a space for shared enthusiasm and love.

As Matt Trueman reflected in a great piece for the Guardian a while back, exploring the internet in the space of the theatre is extraordinarily difficult, and any show that attempts to do so runs the risk of appearing dated almost as soon as it appears. Online developments simply move too fast, so therefore anything that attempts to be technologically innovative and of the moment is almost bound to fail. Instead, what Hippo World Guest Book does so brilliantly is to acknowledge the mechanics of theatre as much as the mechanics of the internet. Rather than attempting to evoke the sleek, digital anonymity of the internet, Goode makes a point of the analogue intimacy of his surroundings. Attention is deliberately drawn to the simplicity of the props, the physical presence of the pieces of paper from which Goode reads, the co-presence of performer and audience members in the same room.

I would suggest that all the best pieces of theatre about (or touching on) the internet – those that really capture something of its spirit, its complexity, its effects on human thought and behaviour – are those that recycle its habits with a simultaneous awareness of the context of the theatre. I’m thinking of the multiple-tab structure of Narrative; the short, sharp bites of theatrical data in Love and Information; the riotous clash of diet tips, “likes” and cat videos in Vivienne Franzmann’s bonkers piece for Open Court’s Collaboration project. Because while perhaps theatre is ill-equipped to deal with the technological intricacies of the networked society, it is perfectly positioned to explore the predicament of individuals and communities within it.

By way of a postscript, I have to say that I’m intrigued (if not also a little horrified) by the idea of a durational performance reading out every single one of Hippo World’s comments …