Miriam Buether – Catherine Love

Escaped Alone, Royal Court

Posted on February 10, 2016March 11, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

It’s not just the tea that’s brewing in Caryl Churchill’s new play. Beneath the sharing of a nice cuppa, something much nastier is simmering away. While four older women sip from their mugs in a sun-bathed garden, premonitions of catastrophe lurk behind their innocuous chit-chat, breaking through in pitch-black interjections. Over the course of less than an hour, the world ends seven times over: with floods, with disease, with fire. Sugar, anyone?

Escaped Alone is a bristling, baffling thing. Running at a brisk 55 minutes, it’s somehow huge and minute all at once. Compared with the formal somersaults of some of Churchill’s previous work, though, the structure is deceptively simple. It’s split into two alternating parts: in one, old friends Sally, Vi and Lena drink tea with neighbour Mrs Jarrett in Sally’s garden; in the other, Mrs Jarrett steps out of the frame of this scenario to deliver bleak missives from humankind’s downfall. Or, as the Royal Court’s blurb pithily puts it: tea and catastrophe.

Churchill’s title is borrowed from the Book of Job (“I only am escaped alone to tell thee”), and there is something oddly Biblical about this play, with its visions of apocalypse and its undercurrents of allegory. Linda Bassett’s affable yet enigmatic Mrs Jarrett plays the unlikely harbinger of doom, sent to warn us all of out-of-control, man-made catastrophes. Or perhaps warn is the wrong word, as these various Armageddons are all relayed in the past tense, laced with the bitter tang of inevitability. There is nothing to be done.

There are nightmarish touches of brilliance to these imagined disasters. In one, we are told – with characteristically surreal Churchill flair – that “the chemicals leaked through the cracks in the money”. Another conjures a world in which food is siphoned off to television programmes, leaving the general public to starve in front of cookery shows. There’s visceral horror, in images of survivors trapped alone underground and people eating rashers of their own fat, knocking up against inky dark humour – even if the gags do feel a little easy at times, airdropping in wry topical references to selfies and property developers.

Churchill is having no less fun in the garden-bound half of the play, in which her female quartet execute scenes of meticulously choreographed gossip. They chat about their grandchildren, about their pasts, about what superpower they’d like to have. This chorus of banalities is all delivered in distinctive Churchill half-sentences, clipped and careful. There’s clearly a shared vocabulary among these old friends. And again it’s rich with terrific moments. In one sequence, the women simply sing The Crystals’ hit “Da Doo Ron Ron” and it’s an absolute joy. Each character also takes their turn to break from the conversation and segue into a strange, disturbing monologue. It’s Sally’s inner voice that startles most, spilling out a breathless and absurd speech about her debilitating phobia of cats. Delivered with mounting intensity by the excellent Deborah Findlay, shoulders rounding protectively while hands nervously flutter, it’s one of the show’s highlights.

It’s the join between the play’s two halves that is more troubling – both interestingly and frustratingly so. You could say crisis and tea are never far apart, but otherwise the relationship between garden and apocalypse is left deliberately opaque. James Macdonald’s taut production at once maintains this ambiguity and gestures towards possible links. The small pauses in conversation – subtle and precise – suggest something more beneath the chatter. Miriam Buether’s design, meanwhile, has more than one nod to the void opened up by Mrs Jarrett’s bleak interludes. The garden, overgrown and vivid and lit by a bright, warm glow, is a sort of idyll, but there’s an odd emptiness to the grey-blue skies above that makes it feel as though it could be the last green refuge in the universe. Looked at this way, its contrast with the blackness that engulfs the intervening scenes, intensified by a flickering red neon surround, seems less stark than it first appears. For all that, though, it’s hard sometimes to fight the suspicion that these are simply two interesting scenarios to riff on, and that the whole is given less attention than its (admittedly intriguing) parts.

Nonetheless, Escaped Alone is never less than watchable, thanks in huge part to its fantastic cast. Much has been made of the fact that this is a play for four women in their sixties and seventies – a demographic still seen with shameful rarity on our stages. While the swift running time means that we can only ever get shards of these characters’ personalities, they’re pretty damn fascinating shards, giving the actors plenty to work with. Alongside Bassett’s slippery Mrs Jarrett and Findlay’s cat-fearing Sally, Kika Markham does delicate work as Lena – introverted yet occasionally spiky (“I do get out,” she indignantly insists) – while June Watson peels back surprising layers in unexpected ex-con Vi.

If there’s anything that holds the piece together, it’s the incessant, latent fear of the present moment that we live in. The paralysing terror that Sally feels when confronted with the idea of cats and the wilful delusion that has become a coping mechanism (“I have to believe there are no cats. And then briefly the joy of that”) might well stand in for any number of twenty-first century threats: ISIS, climate change, global pandemics. Mrs Jarrett’s catastrophes, meanwhile, are a potent cocktail of ancient fears and very contemporary preoccupations. It can often feel that we are living in the end times – or perhaps just on the brink of them – a feeling that Churchill uncannily captures. This is, to quote REM, the end of the world as we know it.

Now then, who wants a cup of tea?

Photo: Johan Persson.

Measure for Measure, Young Vic

Posted on November 2, 2015November 23, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

From the moment the house lights fall at the Young Vic, there’s no doubting that this Measure for Measure is about sex. The curtains – plastic, wipe-clean – part to reveal a writhing orgy of blow-up dolls, painted mouths stretched wide, from which the cast emerge. At the show’s opening, Vienna is soaked in sin. The tight fist of the law has slackened and the people are running amok. In one sense, Shakespeare’s prickly, problematic play is one long tussle to reinstate discipline and restraint. Trouble is, sex – like those miniature mountains of blow-up dolls – is impossible to ignore or deny.

In Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production, everything about the characters can be read from the way they deal with this tangle of plastic limbs. Zubin Varla’s “old fantastical duke of dark corners”, dishevelled and wide-eyed, proclaims to “love the people” in the same movement as trampling his inflatable citizens underfoot. He wants to restore order, but he doesn’t want to be the one to do it. Instead, he appoints Angelo, a man who “scarce confesses / That his blood flows”. Prim as a village priest, Bible tucked under his arm like a comfort blanket, Paul Ready’s unlikely leader picks his way carefully through the debauchery, careful to at once ignore and avoid it. Revelling subjects, meanwhile, throw the dolls from hand to hand, finding pleasure wherever they can.

Then there’s Isabella. The first time we see her, Romola Garai’s nun-in-training wearily pushes all relics of earthly temptation out of her way, murmuring reverent words of prayer as she does so. No hanky-panky for her, nor seemingly any desire for it. When her brother Claudio (Ivanno Jeremiah) is to be executed as an example – his pre-marital sexual exploits here caught on tape in a sly nod to surveillance culture – she finds her voice, making a persuasive petition to Angelo. Garai’s Isabella might be forbiddingly austere, but she’s also steely and impassioned, positively spitting out the words “man, proud man”. Although she’s trapped in what is still, for all the modern dress, overwhelmingly a man’s world, she is not a woman to underestimate.

This is a Measure for Measure full of fascinating if sometimes incongruous character interpretations. Ready’s Angelo is a preening, cowardly tyrant, preaching with new-found vanity one moment and shrinking into corners the next. Overcome by desire for Isabella, he grasps uncertainly at one of the pillars enclosing the stage, desperate for something to hold onto in this new world of dissolving morals. For all his seeming meekness, though, the proposition he puts to Isabella is doubly unsettling for its tentative, insidious abuse of power – an abuse that is still painfully resonant. This Angelo could just as well be a smarmy businessman making advances on a young female employee.

On the side of the more open sinners, unapologetic pimp Pompey (Tom Edden) seems to have arrived in Vienna straight from the streets of New York, conning his way out of trouble with fast-talking, ad-libbing wit. His regular client Lucio, on the other hand, is a cynical and surprisingly clear-sighted transgressor in John Mackay’s aggressive performance, pursuing the disguised Duke with dogged suspicion. Stripping the text down to a slender two hours, Hill-Gibbins and dramaturg Zoë Svendsen have cut or minimised many of Shakespeare’s minor, comedic characters, rolling bumbling constable Elbow into Hammed Animashaun’s uniformed Provost and keeping brothel owner Mistress Overdone offstage. Instead, we see this side of Vienna via a brilliantly daft – if possibly superfluous – pastiche of 90s hip-hop videos, as drug- and sex-fuelled anarchy reins in open mockery of Angelo’s new regime.

There are lots of these bold but silly touches in Hill-Gibbins’ production, some more successful than others. When Cath Whitefield’s spurned Mariana rocks out to Alanis Morissette, it’s hard to know whether to read it as an ironic comment on the angry-woman-wronged trope or just a gag designed for easy laughs. Other stage images, like those ever-present inflatable bodies, are both absurd and articulate, making a statement on the play at the same time as revelling in their own strangeness and audacity.

Aside from all the dolls, the most striking aspect of Miriam Buether’s design is its allusion to the fiery and fantastical imagery of medieval religious painting. The back wall of the performance space, periodically sliding aside to reveal the police cell where justice is clumsily meted out, is laid out in three panels like a triptych altarpiece, projected both with scenes from Christian paintings and live streamed video of the performers (now something of a European-flavoured Hill-Gibbins trademark). In one scene, we see a close-up of Claudio’s desperate, pleading face; in another, a cackling painted devil.

And like those paintings, Hill-Gibbins and Buether draw out both the excess and the religiosity – hypocritical or otherwise – of Shakespeare’s play. For all their holy intent, artworks like Hans Memling’s The Last Judgement or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights are a riot of colour and bodies and flames, as ridiculous in their own way as the piles of plastic flesh on the stage of the Young Vic. There’s no reason why the bizarre shouldn’t knock up against the Biblical.

Crucially, Hill-Gibbins and his team don’t attempt to solve the problem at the heart of Shakespeare’s play. Their interpretation embraces strangeness and ambiguity, its swirling soup of religious and pop cultural references never subsiding into a neat pattern. This is a dark play, for sure, but it’s also sexy and transgressive and funny and ludicrous. As the final scene awkwardly arranges the characters into their unlikely (and likely unhappy) pairings, that spiky contradiction that runs right through the play is slammed – like the dolls – centre stage.

Photo: Keith Pattinson.

In The Republic of Happiness

Posted on February 12, 2013April 3, 2013 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 Change of Scene

Posted on October 17, 2012April 4, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Sitting folded origami-like in my seat in the balcony of the Royal Court, I can’t fight a certain nagging irritation at the peripheries of my perception. Captivating as its disconnected scenes are, there’s something distracting about Love and Information, Caryl Churchill’s new piece about the knowledge onslaught of the digital age. Or, more accurately, it’s the lack of distraction that becomes distracting in itself. Staged in Miriam Buether’s open-sided white cube of a set, each of Churchill’s 57 miniature plays is punctuated by a blackout, during which cast members and props are swiftly, invisibly switched. Each scene is surgically removed with such precision that not even a scar remains.

It’s a dizzying feat of stage management, but in its very invisibility it attracts attention. Doing away with the creaking, carefully ignored dragging on and off of props by stage hands and cast members, the production instead leaves a gaping black hole into which our latent anxieties about the craft of the stage are helplessly sucked. It might be seen as an inversion of the effect of Mike Leigh’s Grief at the National Theatre last year, in which tiny tweaks to the meticulously naturalistic set were made with unapologetic conspicuousness. Only when pronounced in either its presence or absence, it would seem, does the inherently awkward scene change impinge on the audience’s consciousness.

The scene change, as a convention, is a culturally conditioned blind spot in the illusion of representational theatre, an unseemly blip that we as an audience collectively ignore. We can handle a table being spirited in by black-clad figures in semi-darkness, or characters suddenly, inexplicably transporting chairs off with them upon their exit; this is all part of a game whose rules we are smug in the knowledge of. We know how this works. It’s the disruption of those rules and thus the unveiling of the game that causes discomfort, a discomfort that might fall under theatre academic Nicholas Ridout’s diagnosis of the “ontological queasiness” that theatre is capable of producing.

Much like Ridout’s description of the unsettling experience of a face-to-face encounter during a performance, a break in the conventions of the scene change can cause an uncertain lurch, a disconnect between the accepted illusion and the reality behind it. We’re aware not only that this isn’t real, which we knew all along even if we’d suppressed that knowledge, but that we have been willing participants in the illusion. What we’d ignored is suddenly impossible to ignore, either in its overt interference or its glaring absence. To take the resulting discomfort a step further, it might be suggested, to stick with Ridout, that our blushing reaction is caused by an acknowledgement of the economic relations at play: we’ve paid for people to shift the set around and agreed an unspoken contract to pretend that they’re not there.

So we could just see these odd dislocations as inadvertent slip-ups, of over-efficiency in the case of Love and Information and of sheer clumsiness in Grief, slip-ups that throw open the true nature of the economic exchange upon which theatre is based. But the more I think about these two examples, the more I wonder if there might be more to the simple scene change than a necessary movement of props that can choose to either conceal or expose its seams.

While at the time of watching Grief the constant to-ing and fro-ing of stage hands was a frustrating distraction and the small changes it was all in aid of seemed to be a hint that Leigh had become more accustomed to the cutting room than the stage, in retrospect it acquires more significance. Why construct such a perfectly observed sphere of naturalism, down to the last precisely placed photo frame, just to smash that illusion apart with the intrusion of backstage mechanisms?

Assuming, as I think good criticism should, that creative choices have been made for a reason, it is perhaps more productive to think of these intrusions as a deliberate jolting of the hermetically sealed suburbia in which Leigh’s protagonists exist. The changing of a vase of flowers or the tidying of a pile of newspapers, alterations so small they are laughable, could in this context be read as a comment on the essentially unchanging atmosphere of this household, a decaying stasis that is at the heart of the piece. These tiny adjustments mock the fatal lack of any real transformation. Scene change, if interpreted thus, is thematically enmeshed with scene; stagecraft reflects the content of the stage.

Likewise, the dazzling smoothness of Love and Information’s transitions would seem, when investigated in conjunction with the piece as a whole, to have a guiding rationale. Buether’s minimal container of a stage, with its clinical white glow, recalls the screen of a computer or smartphone; as actors and props appear and disappear with a magically seamless lack of fuss, the experience of viewing is strikingly similar to the experience of clicking through videos or apps. What we are witnessing is a series of downloads in an age of unlimited digital information.

These are striking but certainly not solitary examples. It would be naive and potentially insulting to suggest that no more creative thought is invested in the transition between scenes beyond which piece of furniture needs to be shifted where. But perhaps from a critical perspective, when we encounter the humble scene change, we ought to start considering this seemingly unremarkable feature of the stage as something that might alter more than just the props or signified location – as something that has the power to truly change and shape the situation being presented.