Issue 15, 2008
Prompt Corner 
Last issue's Quote of the Fortnight came from a prodigious blog entry in which Chris Goode mused on theatremakers' relationship(s) with the audience, and in particular the difference between "the audience" as a general, hypothetical entity considered during the making of a theatre piece and any actual audience encountered during a specific performance. As usual with the issue which appears at this time of year, I write this column from amidst the Edinburgh Festivals, and by chance, audience relationships have been a major theme for me today.
I may have recounted before how I once watched director Mike Bradwell teach a lesson to a young company whose show involved haranguing the audience. When a supposedly thuggish character yelled at Mike, with many profanities, to move somewhere else, Mike quietly, politely but firmly said, "No." As matters continued and a second "hooligan" entered the argument, Mike gave them a way out: "Say 'please." To do so would, of course, compel them to break character, and in the end they had to do just that. This wasn't an ostentatious, public display of nuisance-making; I doubt that even haft a dozen of us saw what was going on. But Mike's point was that, if you make a piece of live performance that involves the audience being denied a role as passive consumers but still expected to respond passively to commands like that, you have unilaterally rewritten the theatrical compact for that event and you need to take into account the possibility that some might not choose to accept those new conditions. You need coping strategies.
Bullying
Ash happens, today I encountered almost exactly the same situation. Badac Theatres The Factory has been receiving warm reviews as a direct, harrowing evocation of the Holocaust, and in particular the industrial manner in which victims were processed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a promenade piece which involves the audience being herded into a number of different spaces as they progress, with performers, to the gas chamber. The herding is done loudly, aggressively and abusively. Abuse need not, of course, be physical: as the troop compliment in Guantanamo could confirm, aural and/or verbal treatment can be quite forcefully abusive on its own. So, to be clear, these actors were not pretending to bellow at us: they were bellowing at us. They were not pretending to deafen us by prolonged metal-beating sessions in a confined, stone-walled space: to be sure, this was a symbol of physical beatings given, but the reality is that they were deafening us. Overall, they were not pretending, as the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, to bully us: they, as actors, were bullying us.
So, around halfway through the hour-long piece, after three previous instances of "You! Fucking move!", and in a position where only a handful of the audience might be even minimally disrupted, I did a Bradwell. I quietly but firmly said, "No" every time I was bellowed at to move, and then modified it to "Say 'please." The performer simply kept bellowing "Move!" or "Fucking move!" around a dozen times, then moved on to the doorway into the next chamber, hung around for 30 seconds or so and left me there. No coping strategy at all. The show had broken down, for me at least, so I left.
Brutal
Badac's web site explains that as a result of their interest in violence and extremity 'The actors will be led to a point of physical destruction, where they have no more to give; from this exhaustion, this freedom, we will explore their violence, we will pull from them their capacity for destruction and channel this into the play. The experience this creates for both the actors and the audience will be intense, disturbing, brutal and destructive. This is what we want." The significant point here is that no thought whatever seems to have been given to the audience's role in the performance transaction. It is assumed that we will comply, that we will acquiesce in their treatment of us. In Chris Goode's terms, it is assumed that every instance of "an audience"–every particular grouping in an individual performance – will behave identically to "the audience", the general hypothetical creature posited during the making of the piece. And that just isn't so. Thus, the bitter irony arises that The Factory is intended as an indictinent of an infernal process in which the administrators behaved with a certain complacency, taking the passive complicity of their human "throughput" for granted and making no allowances for individuality, and yet the piece itself behaves with exactly the same complacency and absence of allowances.
(As a footnote, this evening two of the performers spent half an hour shadowing me as I moved through the venue bar, but without making direct contact, as I presume they would have h they'd wanted to discuss the matter. It felt as if I were being teavied" all over again, without the theatrical context to even pretend to sanction X. No doubt we shall actually talk to each other in the days to come; it could be interesting.)
Implicit
This issue, though fascinating – to me, at least hardty touches at all on the shows covered in this issue. There are a couple of broader instances, though. As my FT review of Wink The Other Eye goes a little way towards suggesting, the reception of Angus Barr's music-hall history show depends to a significant extent on the viewer making an implicit prior agreement to buy into the music-hall ethos as a whole; if we are not already on-side, the show will not convert us. We need to show a co-operative attitude (though not to the extent of the drunken chap on the press night, clad in blazer and whiskers and sitting in the front row, who attempted to find himself a part in the dialogue). In some ways the same is true of The Female Of The Species we need to accept author Joanna Murray-Smith's assurance that her protagonist is not in any significant sense meant to be Germaine Greer, even as we savour the similarities of character and even idiolect But this isn't a particularly radical demand to make: when Private Eye magazine ran an error-riddled item condemning the play as 'the sneakiest bio-drama ever written", I couldn't resist dropping a line to remind them of the existence of this thing called satire. Dear me, I do seem to be growing awkward...
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
- No At the Back this issue
Contents / Reviews
London |
|
|
|
|
CHU CHIN CHOW Revival of the operetta by Frederic Norton, book and lyrics by Oscar Asche |
Finborough |
14 Jul |
28 Jul |
869 |
EDWARD II Revival of the play by Christopher Marlowe (JMK Award) |
BAC |
22 Jul |
9 Aug |
866 |
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES New play by Joanna Murray Smith |
Vaudeville |
16 Jul |
4 Oct |
850 |
50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER by Lucy Chillery, Ben Ellis, Stacey Green,Lucy Kirkwood, Ben Schiffer Bush |
21 Jul |
9 Aug |
|
862 |
GOB SQUAD'S KITCHEN Johanna Freiburg,Sean Patten,Berit Stumpf,Sarah Thom,Bastian TrostSimon Will Soho |
21 Jul |
26 Jul |
|
876 |
I, LEAR New play by Andrew Jones and Ciaran Murtagh, with Cal McCrystal (The Black Sheep) |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
24 Jul |
16 Aug |
872 |
THE MAGDALENE MYSTERIES New piece by Jacek Ludwig Scarso (Vocal Motions Elastic Theatre) |
Southwark Playhouse |
14 Jul |
19 Jul |
861 |
THE MIKADO Revival of the light opera by W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan |
Union SE1 |
23 Jul |
16 Aug |
849 |
NOCTURNE New solo play by Adam Rapp |
Almeida |
18 Jul |
26 Jul |
860 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (Principal TC) |
Forty Hall, Enfield |
8 Jul |
19 Jul |
854 |
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of the adaptation by Joe Calarco |
Southwark Playhouse |
22 Jul |
2 Aug |
863 |
A SLIGHT ACHE Revival of the play by Harold Pinter |
Lyttelton |
25 Jul |
3 Aug |
867 |
STREEET SCENE Musical by Kurt Weill, lyrics Langston Hughes, book Elmer Rice |
Young Vic |
17 Jul |
22 Jul |
857 |
UNDER THE BLUE SKY Revival of the play by David Eldridge |
Duke of York's |
25 Jul |
20 Sep |
873 |
WEST SIDE STORY Revival of the musical by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein |
Sadler's Wells |
24 Jul |
31 Aug |
868 |
WINK THE OTHER EYE New play by Angus Barr |
Wilton's Music Hall |
21 Jul |
16 Aug |
864 |
ZORRO — THE MUSICAL Book and lyrics, Stephen Clark, music The Gipsy Kings |
Garrick |
15 Jul |
|
845 |
Regions |
|
|
|
|
BORN IN THE GARDENS Revival of the play by Peter Nichols (Peter Hall Co) |
Bath, Theatre Royal |
22 Jul |
9 Aug |
883 |
A DOLL'S HOUSE Revival of the play by Henrik Ibsen, new version by Stephen Mulrine (Peter Hall Co) |
Bath, Theatre Royal |
23 Jul |
9 Aug |
885 |
EIGHT MILES HIGH Revival of the play by Jim Cartwright |
Liverpool, Royal Court |
18 Jul |
16 Aug |
879 |
HEARTBREAK HOUSE Revival of the play by George Bernard Shaw |
Pitlochry |
17 Jul |
|
890 |
LIFE AND BETH New play by Alan Ayckbourn |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
22 Jul |
|
880 |
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (Bard in the Botanics) |
Glasgow, Botanic Gardens |
27 Jun |
12 Jul |
889 |
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (Bard in the Botanics) |
Glasgow, Botanic Gardens |
18 Jul |
2 Aug |
889 |
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY Adapted by Nicki Frei from the novel by Henry James (Peter Hall Co) |
Bath, Theatre Royal |
23 Jul |
9 Aug |
885 |
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN Adapted by Mike Kenny from the book by E Nesbit |
York National Railway Museum |
17 Jul |
23 Aug |
878 |
RELATIVELY SPEAKING Revival of the play by Alan Ayckboum |
Richmond (tour) |
21 Jul |
26 Jul |
880 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (Globe Touring) |
Winchester, Avington Park (tour) |
19 Jul |
20 Jul |
877 |
SUNSET BOULEVARD Revival of the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, Christopher Hampton |
Newbury, Watermill |
14 Jul |
30 Aug |
877 |
THE WINTER'S TALE Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (Globe Touring) |
Kent, Leeds Castle (tour) |
9 Jul |
13 Jul |
877 |