PULSE Fringe Festival

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

I’m sitting in an orange camper van – the sort of camper van where chintz comes to die and in which families spend weeks of cramped, forced jollity in the British countryside. Perched on a small bench, a performer kneels almost uncomfortably close, her eyes fixed steadily on mine. In a swift one-on-one performance that brings a whole new meaning to theatrical intimacy, I am told a secret.

This is the Campsite, a venue “dedicated to supporting unfeasible ideas and impractical performance work” at the PULSE Fringe Festival in Ipswich. That might also work as a strapline for the festival as a whole, or at least for the little I saw of it over the weekend (2nd-3rd June). While some of the work is being presented in a finished state (though it must be said that much of this finished work is cordoned off from reviews because of Edinburgh Fringe First eligibility guidelines), this is chiefly a space for experimentation and scratch performances, an opportunity for artists to trial their work outside London. As such, there is a messy feel to proceedings – not necessarily a bad thing, but a fact that can make the festival tricky to write about.

Let’s start, then, with the camper vans. There are five in total, each with its own name, as well as a couple of tents pitched up in the small space behind the New Wolsey Studio. It’s impossible to see everything on the Campsite, but I spend most of my time there in the chintz-decked Joni. The brief secret relayed to me in these surroundings is part of Everything You Ever Wanted to Say But Didn’t, a project curated and performed by Rhiannon Armstrong. The title says it all: Armstrong is collecting admissions from strangers, building an anonymous bank of things left unsaid and performing these in intimate settings. In this sense, the camper van works perfectly for her, enhancing the slightly uncomfortable sense that something private is being shared and compressing the usual distance between performer and audience – in this case an audience of one. It is a nice idea, but an inevitably slight one, particularly as the arbitrarily chosen secret I am told is very short. It is difficult to convey much in a couple of minutes.

The cosy intimacy of Joni works even more effectively for Fergus Evans’ gentle piece about the notion of home. For this, four of us pile into the camper van with Evans, where we write our names and the places we call home on stickers. In this home of kinds, Evans speaks surprisingly movingly about his hometown far away in Atlanta, transporting us from drab drizzle to stifling heat with his unshowy yet poetic words. He also implicitly questions our memories of home and how we describe it to others, delicately exposing the lies he tells and by extension the lies that we all tell when wearing the rose-tinted glasses that seem to inescapably accompany thoughts of the place we call home.

In contrast to the intimacy of these pieces, Daniel Bye’s performance lecture The Price of Everything is an exercise in miniaturising something that is usually performed to a crowd of significantly more than the three of us squeezed onto the camper van bench. I can in some ways see how it might work better in a bigger setting, particularly the powerpoint presentation elements, but there is also something powerful about the ugliness of capitalism being brutally satirised mere inches from you. There is certainly no room to escape or ignore Bye’s thought-provoking investigation into the worth of things versus their monetary value.

This, of course, is just scratching the surface of the diverse array of work on offer in the collection of caravans and tents dotted around the site. I was particularly curious about an interactive performance inspired by Where the Wild Things Are, which based on an outside view seemed to mainly involve noisily testing the caravan’s suspension to breaking point, while I was disappointed to miss a hilarious sounding site-wide musical version of Ghostbusters. The variety, while doubtless hit and miss, is all part of the beauty.

Away from the Campsite, which is pretty much a case of rock up and see what’s going on, the shows elsewhere follow a slightly more structured pattern. However, this doesn’t necessarily make them easier to write about. The performances at PULSE often resist being weighed up and judged within any formal structure, not least because many of them are still works in progress (more on that later), but in a slight nod to the traditional review format I’ve collected together some thoughts on each of the individual shows below:

[Where the piece is a work in progress, I’ve indicated this with an asterisk. I also saw Thin Ice and My Robot Heart, but both have review embargoes ahead of Edinburgh.]

Good Boy*

Joseph Mercier’s short work in progress advertises itself as a dance solo, but contains strikingly little movement. For the majority of the twenty five minute piece, Mercier speaks Felix Lane’s text (inspired by Jean Genet) in a strangely haunting monotone from behind a microphone, intermittently lit by mesmerising, pulsing spotlights. The sexually explicit yet poetic language draws primarily on Genet’s portrayals of homosexuality and the idea of being an outcast, confronting uncomfortable taboos with softly spoken words.

The gestures may be minimal, but even the simple clenching and opening of a fist speaks of the guarded harshness and open vulnerability that mingle within the piece. The tenderest moment arrives when a member of the audience dances slowly with Mercier on the stage, suggestive of the delicate connections that can be forged between strangers. The show lacks coherence and unity, but this may be a symptom of its currently unfinished state. Even with its flaws, however, I found myself oddly absorbed without being able to quite pin down why.

Emily’s Very Sad Play*

Despite being one of the roughest, sketchiest performances of the weekend, this was also one of the most fascinating. I’ve already laid out a few initial thoughts on the show, which I’ll attempt to extend a little further here. Starting with the basics, Sara Pascoe’s solo performance is about Emily, a character of questionable sanity who is struggling to separate her own story from all those she has read in books. She lies, plagiarises, continually spouts literature and searches for the truth. It is, as I have already written about, an intriguing and intelligent investigation of the intertextuality of our lives, playing with the literary fabric of the knowledge we gain almost by osmosis, questioning how much of our identity we borrow from books. Emily is an extreme, but none of us are entirely free from the influences that threaten to swallow her whole.

The piece is performed in a stream of consciousness style by Pascoe, an appealingly oddball and often very funny performer. Our ideas of madness are challenged, as Emily tells us that “it’s easy to prove you’re crazy – just say everything you’re thinking”. After all, how sane are any of us really? Another interesting element that I only lightly touched upon previously is the implicit examination of women and madness. Emily’s literary references, from Medea to Ophelia, plug into a recurring literary trope of female madness and hysteria, and it seems significant to this character’s relationship with literature that she is a woman (here my mind immediately leapt to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic). Emily’s obsession with pregnancy is linked to a conception of the female sex as defined by motherhood, while her humorous description of the unrealistic romantic expectations engendered by the likes of Jane Austen hits on an uncomfortable truth. These ideas are not fully fleshed out in this early version of the show, but they open up discussions that I’m keen to see continued.

Tatty-Del Are Making It Work*

… or “can friends make art together?” tatty-del, a collaboration between friends and theatremakers Natalie and Hanna, were in trouble. Last year, Natalie attempted to “break up” with Hanna following multiple artistic disappointments, prompting the pair to go to couples’ therapy and delve into past friendships to try and (you guessed it) make it work. This work in progress is the result of that process, a messy patchwork of memories and conversations that address the nature of friendship and collaboration. These ideas are approached with humour, as the pair take us back through adolescent relationships that prove cringingly recognisable and establish the extent to which our friendships influence who we become.

While the compatibility of art and friendship is a big idea to tackle and one in which few conclusions are reached, almost more interesting is the way in which tatty-del figure our memories of friendship. Once important relationships become amusing anecdotes, told over and over again until they are little more than stories (something that is underlined by the inherent artificiality of repeated performance). It is fascinating to see acted out before us the way in which our past friendships become markers in the story of our lives, exposing the half-fictions we all build around our own identity. In the show’s current bitty and confused incarnation, I’m not quite sure that Natalie and Hanna are making it work, but this certainly feels like the start of something rather than the ending that the duo came so close to.

Legs 11

Tom Marshman, a performer with long, shapely legs and a history of varicose veins, ended up being an unlikely finalist in Pretty Polly’s search for the best legs in the country. This appealingly quirky true story forms the basis for Marshman’s solo show, an odd cabaret-style performance that takes us on a journey through Marshman’s turbulent relationship with his legs and brings in elements of gender identity. There are some striking images that emerge: the piece opens with Marshman in relative darkness, speaking breathily into his microphone, as an almost hypnotising display of synchronised leg movements is projected onto a screen; during the operation to remove his varicose veins, Marshman holds out a blue, plastic surgical gown as a screen behind which his legs are hauntingly silhouetted, all to a soundtrack of waves lapping the shore. There is also some particularly inventive audience participation involving punch, tights and a pair of very long straws (I’ll cryptically leave it at that for you to conjure your own image).

Somewhere during the hour-long performance, however, Marshman lost me. In his opening address to the audience, he suggests that his experiences will have something to say about the wider issue of body confidence, but the only body under the microscope here is Marshman’s. Perhaps my disappointment with the show is partly to do with it not delivering what I was hoping for, in which case its perceived shortcomings are a result of my own subconscious prejudices, but this ultimately seems like little more than a mildly entertaining ego-trip. Marshman may well have overcome his body issues, and should be congratulated for that. The self-congratulation he thrusts upon his audience, however, eventually becomes just plain boring.

Buttercup

Tom Wainwright’s odd little creation was one of the surprise joys of the weekend for me. The eponymous Buttercup is a “fat cow” from Lancashire, an unloved character who finds herself thrust into the limelight when she is selected to take part in a Jamie Oliver show, a brush with fame that leads to a stint on Masterchef and her very own reality show, The Only Way is Lancashire. As might be expected from this description, Wainwright’s is a show that skewers our obsession with reality television and our fetishisation of fame, albeit very amusingly. He also has a good prod at lazy middle-class perceptions of characters such as Buttercup and at a London-centric view of the country.

This sixty-minute show is for the most part riotously funny. Alongside his characterisation of Buttercup, accompanied with spirited stamps and tail swishes, Wainwright proves to be a mean impressionist, switching between uncanny imitations of TV chefs and the “stars” (inverted commas firmly in place) of The Only Way is Essex. The laughs have a harsh edge, however, that elevates this into something far more interesting than an exercise in imitation, while startling moments of emotional truth break through the comedy. Making your audience laugh at themselves and following that with a bitter pill of realisation is quite a skill, and one that Wainwright pulls off effortlessly. Hilarious it may be, but this is comedy with bite.

Goose Party

The weekend concludes, appropriately, with a party. Little Bulb, probably best known for fringe hit Operation Greenfield, present a performance that is more of a gig than anything else. The infectiously energetic group veer from folk to blues to rock, all with equal flair, concluding their schizophrenic musical stylings with the observation that each of us is “a hundred different people”. There is a loose message about identity in there, but this is really about having a good time, which Little Bulb are extraordinarily good at. As the performances ratchet up their energy, we are assaulted with bubbles, glitter, feathers, costume changes galore. There soon remains little option but to grin stupidly and be taken along by it all. To be quite honest, I’m not entirely sure how else to write about Goose Party; it’s tough to distil pure joy.

——–

Alongside assessing the work on an individual, specific basis, I have a few wider questions born out of the weekend that I’d also like to address – or, in some cases, to simply ask. Firstly, this issue of how to write about work in progress. It’s something that Lyn Gardner recently wrote about for the Guardian, in a piece in which she expressed concerns that reviewing work in the early stages of its development might be damaging rather than constructive. That might well be the case within the mainstream media review format, limited to a few hundred words and forced to stamp the piece with a star rating, but is it any different in the online space?

I must admit, I’m not sure. I think that constructive dialogue is an important stage in developing a piece of work, but whether a review is the best way in which to conduct such dialogue is questionable. This possibility of conversation between theatremakers and (for want of a better word) critics is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and something that has been influenced by my own recent experience of being invited into a rehearsal room. I don’t have huge confidence in my own ability to help shape a piece of work with my input, but I’m ready to try, whether that be airing my thoughts in a rehearsal room or scribbling them down. While I’m not restricted by word limits in this space, the sheer volume of work at PULSE has caused me to rein in my responses slightly, but if any of the theatremakers involved in the shows I’ve written about above happen to be reading this and want to talk further, then please feel free to get in touch.

Secondly, an intriguing thought occurred to me while watching tatty-del’s show about truth and artificiality in performance. I’m probably not saying anything new here, but I had a slight light bulb moment in connection with the tension in theatre between repetition and liveness. What do I mean? Well, theatre (or at least most theatre) is essentially the same thing night after night; the same lines, the same movements, the same scenes being played out. Yet simultaneously it is a live art form and therefore necessarily shifting and ephemeral. The former brings with it artificiality, because everything is carefully planned and repeated, but the latter implies a sort of truth that is inherent in the liveness and unique to that moment.

These thoughts were prompted by tatty-del because their piece was about emotional truth within their relationship and at the same time about how fake some elements of friendship can be, both of which seemed wrapped up in their style of performing. Which made me think that perhaps in scratch performances, this paradox sits closer to the surface than in most theatre, lending such performances an element of excitement and discovery that has sometimes been ironed out of slick, finished work. Of course, whether a piece of theatre is ever really finished is another question entirely and one that also came up when I recently sat in on rehearsals, but I’ll leave that particular door closed for now.

Even after writing at such length, there’s still lots more to digest and think over. What sort of implications do the experiments taking place at festivals such as PULSE have for the wider dynamic between performer and audience? How do these festivals contribute to the theatre ecosystem as a whole, and where do they sit within that? Is the availability of this work outside London actually having any impact on regional theatre? I had one conversation with a fellow writer and festival-goer about the concern that we are just talking to ourselves; he was worried that the same people attend the same sort of events and that there is no new audience for this work. Looking around at the sparse audiences for some of the shows and recognising the same faces certainly reinforces that concern. Does it matter that this is the case if such festivals continue to support the process of making work? And how do these events engage new audiences? I’m not going to attempt to answer such questions here, but they deserve to be asked.

Finally, in the spirit of honesty, I have to confess that I found the weekend a bit of a struggle. An enjoyable struggle, certainly, but a struggle nonetheless. There is something about work in progress that proves more demanding of an audience than finished work, but beyond the work itself it was also difficult to document it. I had hoped that the festival would be an opportunity to explore new and different modes of theatre criticism, including a range of mediums and immediate responses, but I underestimated the hectic festival atmosphere and my own need to mull things over. While I made some attempts at live-blogging, I discovered that it was tougher than it appears and that perhaps I just wasn’t very good at it.

Before this gets too downbeat, I’m still enthusiastic about the possibilities of digital criticism, I just have to concede that my own brand of digital criticism, like much of the work at PULSE, is still at an embryonic stage. But both are a start.

For my aforementioned fragmented attempts at documenting my festival experience, take a look at my Tumblr blog, my collected tweets from the weekend and my Pinterest festival pin board. I will also be writing a more concise round-up for Fourthwall.

Boys, Soho Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Watching as a recent graduate, Ella Hickson’s latest play is both mildly terrifying and depressingly familiar. Her broken, desperately partying characters painfully evoke the rabbit-in-the-headlights panic of confronting life after university, while Chloe Lamford’s precisely detailed design, right down to the cupboard handles (though thankfully excluding the mess), is almost a carbon copy of my own student kitchen. Coupled with the frantic, competitive drinking and the forced irony of fancy dress, Boys induces a heavy and slightly uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. I’ve been here before.

Hickson’s play comes underscored with a quiet cry of “we’re fucked”. Her graduating students, Benny and Mack, are about to go out into a world that doesn’t want or care about them, leaving a childhood that has promised them everything to enter an adult life that will most likely deliver nothing. Meanwhile, one of their housemates, Cam, freaks out in the face of a concert that could change his life, and the other, Timp, stands as a cautionary example of the monotony of getting stuck in a dead-end job. It’s the boys’ last night together before they must all move out and there’s only one thing they’re certain about: they are going to have one hell of a party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of Hickson’s characters want to grow up. From eternally partying Timp, about to enter his thirties with the mentality of an eighteen-year-old, appropriately dressed as Peter Pan, to the students in denial about their swiftly approaching graduation, there is a stunted, childlike atmosphere to this world. It is not insignificant that the fancy dress theme they choose for their end-of-year party is Disney. Nostalgia taints everything in this backward-looking environment, because the future is just too scary; everyone has their heads buried in the sandpit.

While they put off tomorrow, the boys’ riotous embracing of today is frequently hilarious. Once again the déjà vu attacks, as Hickson perceptively captures the banter and bravado of student dialogue, nailing every last reference and successfully distilling that youthful cocktail of forced confidence and crippling insecurity. These contradictory elements both surface too in the utterly convincing performances of the young cast, who paste over fragility with indifference and play wasted with slurring commitment. Much as he did with Headlong’s strikingly youthful Romeo and Juliet, director Robert Icke injects proceedings with an espresso shot of energy, as the youngsters dance on the table and aggressively knock back drinks.

This edges close to a Skins-esque view of “yoof”, all pints, pills and parties, but Hickson is too clever to pigeon-hole her young characters in the same way that the media is so often guilty of. Beneath the bloodshot eyes and strained façades, tenderness blinks through, while the crude harshness of male banter is softened slightly by the presence of Timp’s chatterbox girlfriend Laura and guarded, delicate Sophie, the ex-girlfriend of Benny’s brother. Benny, whose wounds are closest to the surface, feels the need to fix things – perhaps a reaction to his own brokenness, poignantly conveyed by Danny Kirrane. This is set in opposition to Samuel Edward Cook’s tough guy Mack, who aggressively insists that we are all responsible for ourselves and no one else in a particularly unappealing portrait of staunch individualism.

Through such relationships, Hickson grapples with a wide collection of ideas, some with more success than others. The central nugget is this rage at a world in which the future of the generation now graduating is uncertain at best and stark at worst, but plenty more is going on here. The young characters question what it means to be successful, what the purpose of knowledge is, whether we are responsible for others, if it is still possible to have faith in anything. There is a sense of searching, though this can turn into clumsy fumbling. The scope is to be admired, but sometimes the execution is crude and clunky, increasingly so in the meandering second half as external riots intrude into this claustrophobic pressure cooker. Hickson stalls and starts up again, offering what feel like dramatic conclusions before ploughing on, and eventually soothing the sting of her message with sentimental catharsis.

Hickson’s metaphors, like her plot, start out arresting but end up overdone. The pile-up of rubbish bags caused by local strikes (yet another situation familiar to me from my own student days) becomes a repeated symbol of the trash mounted up by previous generations that is now beginning to rot and fester, asking questions about how we clear it up. Do we simply follow suit and dump our mess on others – the “inalienable right to dump your shit on someone else”, as Mack sneeringly puts it – or must we keep it inside with us and let it poison the air we breathe? This returns to the debate between Benny and Mack about responsibility, but is pushed beyond resonant, underlying significance into the glaringly obvious, until the whole kitchen is swamped in rubbish. By the time the characters eventually set about cleaning up, the symbolism has lost all potency through heavy-handed repetition.

While the conclusion may collapse into sentimentality, it is fitting that there are no easy solutions or resolutions offered in the face of a hostile world that the boys are reluctant to enter and approach with a sigh of apathy. Echoes of Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love can be heard in the youngsters’ resigned recognition that they will never achieve or earn as much as their parents, while the laboured metaphor of the ever increasing rubbish repeats the idea that this generation did not create the mess we are now having to clean up. I was also reminded of another Bartlett line, this time from Earthquakes in London: “bad things are happening, let’s bury our heads in the sand”. This is certainly the mentality of Hickson’s characters, who are only briefly able to look their own bleak future in the eye before returning their gaze to the immediate debris.

Reflecting at a slight distance, it occurs to me that while the ending falters, this might just be somehow appropriate, if disappointing. Hickson writes herself into a situation that is difficult to conclude; the generation she writes about (which just happens to be my generation) is finding it equally difficult to envision where we might end up. Not an intentional symmetry, but a strangely apt one. Conclusions are not forthcoming in either case. Perhaps being young is, in Cam’s words, “as good as it ever fucking gets”.  And in today’s world, that is possibly the most depressing idea of all.

 

 

Wasted, Roundhouse

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

If nostalgia is a disease, then poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s explosive debut play is a startling reminder of just how sick we all are. This bitterly funny snapshot of modern life takes as its subject a lost young generation already busy reliving a past when they used to feel something, haunted by untouched dreams and paralysed by indecision. As one character puts it, “we spend life retelling life”.

Ennui plagued twenty-somethings Ted, Danny and Charlotte are marking the tenth anniversary of the death of their friend Tony, to whom they each confess their fears, frustrations and limitations in a series of lyrical monologues. Everyman Ted, played with a groan of recognition by Cary Crankson, is trapped in a tedious, nausea-inducing office job and a comfortable but unexciting relationship. His best friend Danny, a swaggering yet emotionally delicate Ashley George, is his arty antithesis, the eternal dreamer lazily intent on being a rockstar and winning back Lizzy Watts’ frustrated teacher Charlotte. Each is like a fragment of an old friend, the familiar melded with the idiosyncratic.

Much is familiar in Tempest’s evocative ode to modern London, a concrete playground where the routine is as grey as the pavement and streetlamps blink down instead of stars. In the richly textured, quick-fire speech, shot through with distinctive rap-inflected rhythms, the poetic is often found in the pedestrian. The profound and the mundane are never more than a hair’s width apart, as the three characters question over the course of 24 hours whether happiness lies in chasing youthful dreams or in dull yet companionable trips to Ikea. There is a refreshing honesty to Tempest’s earthy writing, which intelligently recognises the penetrating human truths that can be found in ordinary experience. The resulting vision of life’s inevitable disappointments, sharply funny as it often is, hits close and hard.

Tempest’s persuasive collision of realism and spoken word gig is given punchily paced direction by James Grieve, who with the excellent performers has tapped into a rhythm that rarely falters. Transporting us to the clubs where Londoners drink to escape, Cai Dyfan’s simple yet striking design is all speakers and boom boxes, redolent of the constant noise that plays over empty lives and that pulses powerfully through the Roundhouse courtesy of Kwake Bass’ soundtrack. In another clever touch, close-up film projections of the actors’ blank expressions accompany their fevered monologues, a reminder of the repetitive boredom that they are desperate to break out of.

While this lean, muscular creation could do with some fleshing out, Tempest’s first foray into theatre is an undoubtedly impressive one. Her words paint a vivid, pulsing mural of a city writhing with its own restlessness and discontent, yet straitjacketed by a numbing sense of inertia. Her broken characters, hands wrapped protectively round microphones, warn us upfront that there will be no incredible truth, no deeper meaning in what they are about to relate. Instead the truth they reveal is all too credible.

Macbeth, Globe Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

At the Globe to Globe festival, murder has never been such a social event. All of the major scenes in this brashly vibrant Polish production seem to occur at lavish parties, under the watchful if drink-blurred vision of the witches, here recast as a gaggle of gloriously camp transvestites. In these hedonistic surroundings, as a slurring, stumbling Duncan attempts to strip and unapologetically feels up Lady Macbeth, the plot-propelling act of violence seems more of an escalation of well-oiled passions than an act of calculated ambition. This is homicidal guilt figured as one long hangover, as Michał Majnicz’s increasingly dishevelled Macbeth howls his way through murder after murder.

Despite possessing such a familiar plot, little is recognisable about this reimagining of the play. Numerous inexplicable alterations have been made to Shakespeare’s text, including the addition of a scene-stealing witch named Lola, who might well have been inspired by the Kinks track. But while it may bear only a passing resemblance to the Scottish Play that British audiences are used to, this Macbeth has clearly been designed as a visceral experience rather than a linguistic, intellectual one. To overcome the language barrier, Teatrim Kochanowskiego have drawn on pop culture and visual bravado; colourful, explosive images assault our retinas, while music – everything from Michael Jackson to ‘I Will Survive’ – throbs away in the background. It is messily joyous spectacle, tragedy in the style of Steps rather than Aristotle.

Grasping for any overarching metaphorical unity to tame this sensory riot produces empty hands. There are loosely recurring motifs, the most prominent of these being an overt, swaggering sexuality that lends the production its cautious ‘adult content’ warning. Majnicz and Judyta Paradziń as the bloody handed couple crackle with mutual lust, a sexual desire that seems tangled up with their murderous acts, while one witch unexpectedly indulges Macbeth with a blow job following his ascent to the throne. Amid a circus of playful, riotous colour, one of the production’s most genuinely disturbing images is presented in a scene in which Lady Macduff is brutally raped. Yet when reassembled, these strands do not weave into any identifiable shape. If there is a defining texture to the piece, it is one of vague seediness pasted over with sequins and glitter.

No matter how fragile the basis for its interpretation, however, the sheer visual audacity of this production is enough to provoke a wistful yearning for more aesthetic creativity in British theatre. Flaws aside, this is an ideal marriage of production and festival, eventually embracing the party atmosphere that seems to buzz from the Globe. It may not be Macbeth as any of us know it, but this is anarchically beautiful, visually ingenious, vodka-drenched fun.

Tenet, Gate Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Spoonfed.

Greyscale’s latest work, the first in the Gate’s ‘Resist!’ season, comes with a tongue-twisting disclaimer. This is, as we are told upon entering the auditorium, “a very true story about the revolutionary politics of telling the truth about truth as edited by someone who is not Julian Assange in any literal sense”. If that’s a mouthful, then what we are fed after we take our seats is even harder to digest.

Intertwining the lives of Wikileaks founder Assange and revolutionary nineteenth-century mathematician Evariste Galois, Tenet plays with truth, mathematics, radicalism, power, metaphor, roots and polynomial equations. Keeping up?

At the centre of the piece is the concept of mathematical logic as a radical way of seeing the world. Performers Lucy Ellinson and Jon Foster begin with a familiar mathematical question – how do you find x? – and use this as the basis for questioning our understanding of truth and of the world around us. Like radical genius Galois, we are prodded into finding a new way of thinking. In maths, as arguably in life, the radical simplifies a complex equation; radical thinking, therefore, is demanded if we are to understand and challenge the complicated nature of the status quo. Behind this there is also the issue of Assange’s role as the “editor” of Galois’ life and work, questioning the power and reliability of those who hold the book of facts.

There is a lot going on here, sometimes too much. Despite running at a swift sixty minutes, this is full to the brim with ideas, and difficult ideas at that. As our heads swim with numbers and concepts, it can feel like we, along with the tragically short-lived Galois, are running out of time to work it all out. Fortunately, creators Lorne Campbell and Sandy Grierson never make this feel too much like the classroom; as Ellinson knowingly comments, you can’t make the audience work that hard.

Despite the demanding subject matter, the piece that Campbell and Grierson have assembled is also very funny, and when it gets too hard there are always tea and biscuits helpfully on hand. Maths and theatre, meanwhile, make unlikely but surprisingly comfortable bedfellows. After all, the metaphor that we willingly immerse ourselves in when we watch a performance is just another kind of equation – one thing always stands for another.

The conventions of theatre are also up for analysis in a performance that is sardonically served with a “soupçon of post-modern deconstruction”; we are presented with a set within a set within a set, the performers interrupt the narrative to contradict one another, an explicitly mentioned fourth wall is conjured up and smashed down.

Upon exiting Greyscale’s world, there is a desire to echo Galois’ call for more time and rewind this tightly packed performance in order to mull it over again in all its intricate complexity. Maths may be a straightforward case of black and white, but this intriguing, challenging night of theatre treads the same area of grey occupied by the company responsible for creating it.

~

Some further thoughts on Tenet …

Never does the vicious word count seem more cruel than when attempting to crystallize a piece such as Tenet. During the hour-long performance, I scribbled possibly the most notes I have ever made at the theatre, all the while trying to keep my eyes ahead so as not to miss one minute of the ever-shifting performance. I feel as though I really needed two viewings to fully process everything that was going on – one to take notes and one to simply absorb. Away from the rush and heat of the performance space, my initial impressions have cooled, but there are still a good few more words to peel away from my frazzled brain.

Firstly, I want to write more about Julian Assange’s role as the “editor” of the piece. If we’re getting critical, this is slightly underexplored, but that is perhaps because there is simply so much else going on. Since formulating my own thoughts above, I’ve read other reviews of the play, some of which see Assange as an outlying narrator whose relevance is crowbarred in. While Assange may be less of a central figure than Galois, this was not how I saw it at all. If anything, he functions as an essential conduit for Galois’ story; we see only what he chooses to select from his “book of facts”, further illustrating the reiterated point that knowledge is power. As an individual who demonstrated to the extremes just how powerful knowledge can be and whose actions prompt troubling questions about what knowledge should and should not be released, Assange’s inclusion is anything but arbitrary.

Lucy Ellinson’s Assange protests early on “I am not involvable”, before proceeding to involve himself again and again in the process of storytelling. The two performers frequently interrupt and contradict one another, their voices competing for our attention, Assange overwriting Galois’ own story. It is a potent demonstration before our eyes of the immense influence held by the gatekeepers of history. Who are we meant to believe? What can we trust? For me, Tenet was not only deliciously perplexing because of the complexities of advanced algebra (and maths was never my strong point); Greyscale invite complexity and ambiguity from all angles, a risky but laudable choice. This is theatre which demands engagement from its audience.

Which conveniently brings me onto the second point I wanted to explore further: audience interaction. This has to be possibly the gentlest brand of interactivity to be found on London’s stages – one game audience member was even offered an encouraging hug on press night. With the help of some tea and biscuits, Greyscale seem to have perfected the delicate balance of involving their audience without scaring them off. Yet while the level of performance asked of the audience is relatively minimal, its use prompts intriguing questions about the performer/spectator relationship, the audience dynamic and the wider issue of public protest.

At one point, Jon Foster’s frantic Galois raises us all to our feet, gets us to hold hands and has us collectively, if a little awkwardly, humming “La Marseillaise”. It is a vivid illustration of the power inherent in harnessing an audience. But a moment later we are back in our seats and the balance has shifted back once again to where it was, demonstrating that the wall can be smashed through but it will always quietly reform – a fact that resonates with politics as much as with theatre. As Galois observes, a situation can change, but it can also change back. In another interesting choice, Ellinson and Foster also openly discuss the deliberate choice of the Gate and its typical audience demographic, which opens up a whole other debate about the importance of the type of audience (and their political leanings) to a piece of theatre.

Without seeing this piece all over again, which I’m sorely tempted to do, it is impossible to fully investigate Greyscale’s creation to the level it deserves. Part of my brain is still trying to catch up. Perhaps the best sort of metaphor for Tenet is not an algebraic one but, inspired by the emergency biscuits, a dessert related one. Because really Greyscale’s play is a lot like brain freeze; it makes the head hurt, but it’s more than worth the pain.