Enforced entertainment

I warn in advance that this blog might degenerate into the scholarly in places because of the possible need for me to justify opinions I have on a subject that has cropped up this week – that is, devising. Feel free, therefore, at any point to cut to next week if you feel it coming on. If I may remind you, I am currently on a mission to determine what is meant by ‘cutting edge’ theatre and ‘breaking barriers’ – and indeed whether we can ever hope to attain this ‘ethereal state’.

  

I therefore caught up last week with what I understand is the epitome of cutting edge theatre, Forced Entertainment. The artistic director Tom Etchells once said, “We sometimes go to the edge, a really interesting place to be.” Well, there y’go, it must be cutting edge – and they are one of the Arts Council’s portfolio companies, that is, the Arts Council give them a great deal of money every year to do what they do and guarantee it for several years in advance, or to quote from the Arts Council website: “Since forming the company in 1984, Forced Entertainment have sustained a unique artistic partnership for quarter of a century, confirming their position as trailblazers in contemporary theatre.”

So last week I saw ‘Tomorrow’s Parties’ at the Battersea Arts Centre. The set was a pallet on which the two actors, one man and one woman, stood for the duration of the play (about an hour and a quarter) framed overhead by a festoon of coloured lights (which I understand from the website represents ‘a makeshift fairground’, although there was no reference to fairgrounds in the play itself. The entire thing is a sequence of fairly brief conjectures about the future, ‘utopian and dystopian visions, science fiction scenarios, political nightmares and absurd fantasies’, to quote again from their website, spoken in turn by the actors with each conjecture separated from the next by the word ‘or’. There are no variations from this at all.

So, and I have to confess I can’t remember one single conjecture exactly so I am making these up, but they are not untypical: In the future ‘there will be no men at all, but the world will be run by a tribe of Amazonians’, and then the other one says, ‘Or...there will only be five people left in the world, one on each continent, and they will all be vegetarians and will contribute to the final stages of global warming by farting simultaneously on Sundays’. And the other one then says, ‘Or....’, and suggests something else, and so on – the same pattern ensues for the entire play.

There were no named characters as such – unless the actors on the stage were just themselves, or maybe not, but taking on a persona. I don’t know them personally so I can't say. There was no story as such either, although as the lights began to dim towards the end and side-lit shadowy profiles began to loom, you felt at least that we were moving into a darker state, a dystopian endgame. So there was a beginning (fairly light hearted), a middle (a bit more argumentative and contentious) and an end (dystopian). The script I understand was devised, that is the actors and director talked about the agreed theme (‘guilt and innocence’ apparently), made suggestions, played games, thought of scenarios, and so on, and then what they came up with was written down and became the script. I think that’s how it happened.

So, no characters, no story, no author and no movement around the stage. So was it theatre at all? Let’s use FE’s cutting-edge-ometer again. (For those of you who have just turned up late, see my last blog.) Did it excite? As much as watching the skin form on a rice pudding. Did it frustrate? It certainly did that. After thirty minutes or so I did just begin to start hoping for fewer or’s and more and’s, or however’s or therefore’s. Did it challenge and question? It certainly did that, too.

The main issue was: Is it theatre at all? Well, yes it was in my opinion. Here’s my definition. Theatre is art and art is about intention. If a drunk drops a bottle in the street, it’s litter. If he manages to balance it on its thin end and mutters, ‘Look at that!’ it’s art – because he is manipulating our perception of it. He is getting us to see the bottle in a different way. That is art. It may be bad art, but it is art. Ditto with theatre. The intention comes first and then the aesthetic. Forced Entertainment didn’t accidentally turn up. It wasn’t a dinner party where a couple of people were chatting about what the world would be like. They wanted me to hear and watch and be moved, ‘moved’ in the sense of shift my position on something. And they did do that.

So the aesthetic. How well did they do it? Well not having characters and a story does kind of take away a lot of the fun: Seeing how the victims and the heroes and the villains get on, who they were and what they have become, whether or not they get their just desserts, having the feeling of the denouement  when all the strands are brought together and sorted out, all that was missing. 

And the language was devised, damn it! I have yet to see a play in which the script has been devised, and I know I might offend some people in this, which has any richness or depth in the language. It may be witty (and this was, very funny in fact at times); it may accurately reflect the rhythms and textures of everyday language and therefore feel ‘real’, and people like ‘real’. But compare it with Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas. Is it rich, is it like a garden, or even like Kate Tempest’s urban flowers? I have never known it in a devised script and it wasn’t the case in this either. The great commedia dell’arte actor Isabella Andreini could, it is said, improvise perfect verse. Who can do that today? Maybe the urban rappers begin to – and there’s another tick in Kate Tempest’s quality box. I once looked at a paragraph of my own in ‘The Fairy Queen’ and thought, ‘Hey! That’s as good as Shakespeare!’ And then you look at a play like ‘Twelfth Night’ and you see that he did it for page after page after page.

I have recently started learning to play the piano. I’m loving it – and I reason that, according to the principle that to become brilliant at anything you need to put in 10,000 hours, if I play for three hours a day for the next ten years I could be as good as Keith Jarrett (my favourite jazz musician), or if I put in one and half hours a day I could be half as good as Keith Jarrett. Of course, this kind of misses the point that Keith Jarrett probably has a gene or a chemical in his brain somewhere which allows him to feel music in a way I never could in a million hours of practising – and so Shakespeare was the same with language. You can’t just do this stuff off the cuff! It takes time, practice and that special ‘other thing’. I’m not saying there is no place for devising. It’s good where the movement is more important than the words, and useful  if you don’t have a writer handy and you are desperate to make theatre.

So was 'Tomorrow's Parties' cutting edge or breaking barriers? Sorry. It was not, because using their own definition it did not 'entertain' enough. Maybe it was a useful kind of performance art, a sort of art of 'near theatre', helping (as they claim) to challenge us about what theatre is – and things don’t have to be brilliant all the time. They can sometimes just be good and still have value. In one respect ‘Tomorrow’s Parties’ was really good. They were excellent actors and by having to look at them in one spot all the time you see things microscopically. Look at people at a dinner party: They will poke their ear, scratch their nose, shift their weight, twist their neck to ease stiffness, and so on. It’s what people do – and these actors made a perfect study of it, so I could not take my eyes off them. Of course, because there was no story and they didn’t move around the stage, there was no development – and what was wonderful about Henry Goodman in ‘Arturo Ui’ was the development, the story of his movement as he moved from small time crook to arrogant dictator. That marks the difference between ok-to-good and brilliant theatre.