Creating the sparks

In my recent blogs you may have felt that I was a bit niggardly in my judgments of other companies’ work. I had harsh words to say, for example, about Lucy Kirkwood's ‘gripping thriller’ for Headlong Theatre Co, Chimerica. That it won the best play in The Evening Standard theatre awards and received a five star review by Michael Billington may suggest I might be needing to attend to egg misguidedly delivered to my nostrils instead of my mouth. Let me briefly remind you of my complaint, not that it didn’t have a good story; indeed I was gripped (-ish). What I felt was that the actors’ skills were buried under a scree of ‘newness’, an all singing and dancing set, language so ‘now’, and shot from the hip with such coolness, if words were bullets, Al Capone himself would have struggled to keep up, and a storyline so ‘relevant’ it could have come from the front page of The Guardian (and maybe should have). So wondrously was it all done (And it was! The production values were immaculate) it seems to have carried all before it like a hurricane (except hard to please and niggardly misers like me).

All this begs (on its knees) the question: For something to be cutting edge does it have to be by definition ‘new’. My threat of descending into the scholarly barely touched the surface last week. You may duck now if you wish.

  

T.S.Eliot’s classic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ still has a great deal of relevance. So, Eliot says of the poet, but it applies in my opinion just as much to a new piece of theatre, ‘the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’. So here’s a value to ponder: Newness alone is not enough: creativity should involve the past and the present modifying each other. 

Everything is ‘new as such’ (at some point) as life unfurls, but is it just a cheap imitation of the past or, just as inadequately, an attempt to sever its roots with the past? That thought is helpful to me. When I look at a piece of theatre I am asking myself: in what way has it changed the past and in what way has it learnt from the past? Ok, Chimerica told a good story! Enough said. I give up! But what did it learn? To bury the actors’ skills in fancy toys? And do Forced Entertainment absolutely need to throw out author, plot and character completely?

That is not to say ‘that the material of art’, must always be the same. On the contrary, to quote Eliot again, ‘art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same’ – and part of the cutting edge is in the finding of new tools, or the re-application of old tools. I have no problem with the projection of photo-montage onto revolving cubes, or of actors firing rockets from their backsides if they so wish (and it helps things along) - as long as certain eternal values are maintained: In this case the centrality of the actor and his/her core skills.

If I am to wag my finger (as if anyone would take any notice) it would be to say: Let’s not argue that because something is new it must be breaking barriers. Newness isn’t even half the story.

So if I am so keen on the actor, why did I give devising such a hard time last week? Fair point, given that devising places the actor at the very centre of making theatre. Well, I’m not questioning devising for that reason. I want actors to be at the very centre, too, but first you’ve got to look at what is going on when making a play and in what ways they can be at the centre.

In the Saturday Guardian’s review last weekend of Stanley Crouch’s ‘Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker’, Crouch quotes a colleague of Parker. “The thing I loved about Bird (Parker) is this: he wasn’t one of those who’s got to write something down, go home, study on it, and the next time we meet, we’ll try it out. Anything anyone did that Bird liked, when he found out what it was, he’d do it right away. Instantly. Only once on everything.” So if Charlie Parker can make something straight off without studying, why, potentially at least, can’t actors? The point is, as the reviewer mentions, he could do it because he had already put in the 10,000 hours. Similarly, Keith Jarrett can sit down at a piano, pause, not know what he is going to play and then make something up on the spot that is beautiful. So why am I against devising? I have already answered that last week, so I want to talk about the converse of it: Why I believe working in another way is better.

I like to think of our own work, that is The Rudes’ work, as similar to jazz. Jazz is by definition ensemble; it is the bringing together of specialists. Each has put the work in, done the 10,000 hours; each has accumulated a billion epithets (little bricks or units of construction) to contribute to the whole construction. Then they come together and, sparking off each, they dig deep into themselves and offer something - like each bringing something to a meal, one the pasta and one the wine. Sorry about the mixed metaphors, but what the hell. This is what I have; this is what I want to give – and, knowing what to give and what not to give, the whole is put together and something unique and beautiful is made. Ok, so surely this is devising? Yes it is, but the issue with making theatre is that the actors have their bodies and voices, skills studied over thousands of hours, the writer brings language, equally studied over thousands of hours, and the director brings possible directions, organisation and objectivity. If any one of these three parties tries to do it all, then something is lost. So what appears as spontaneity is in fact an ‘electrical event’ when several already charged particles come together.

 

I want to talk again, another time, about the apparent spontaneous creation of language in the commedia dell’arte tradition of which we are a part and the misunderstandings about all’improvviso, but for the moment in my pursuit of the cutting edge I am looking for: creativity that involves the past and the present modifying each other, the proper distribution of roles within the whole, and each party having done the work so that when it all comes together sparks can fly. I shall talk about Ed Hall’s company Propeller next week and their production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.