Fail Blog

I have just spent forty-five minutes laughing at various "Facebook Fails." Before that, I watched some clips of Jeremy Kyle, wondering why the couples were together and whether there is more in-breeding than I had previously surmised. This binge on other people's failure began with an Alan Partridge marathon.

And all I was doing was making myself feel better about my own failures.

I'll come to the nature of my failures another time - they concern my inability to translate Big Ideas into a Practical Good Life. I am more interested in how failures are served up, through the internet, as entertainment. There are partially moral warnings - watch out lest you end up having Kyle reading out the answers to your "all important lie-detector test" - and partially slapstick entertainment. And the more slapstick, the more it becomes a warning: the bigger the warning, the funnier the slapstick.

Failure is not something that anyone aspires towards. It is relocated - onto YouTube, into the ghetto of "reality TV." Failure is a bit like sin used to be: everyone does it, but no-one admits to it.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig suggests that failure is essential to the process of attaining "quality." In his sequel, Lila, he even suggests that mental illness - a sign of social disfunction, along with many other things - is part of the process, too. He embraces failure, the marginalised, the excluded. Not out of compassion (Phaedrus, his hero and author avatar, is more rational than kindly), but because these things are an essential part of the world.

I am currently pondering the purpose of art and criticism. Gradually, I'll unfurl my conclusions to an indifferent universe. Today, I am thinking about the nature of failure. Under current critical conditions, it is possible to grade a play in such a way that it either succeeds or fails.

Even if I resist the idea that a play's success is to do with the quality of the performers or directors or script, and replace it with the argument that it is the clarity of expression that matters, I'm still assigning pass or fail criteria.

Let's assume that a certain play failed... or to break it down a little, that certain aspects of a play failed. I am more comfortable, even in thought experiments, in avoiding too general a statement.

I am taking The Maids as my text today.

There were two aspects of The Maids that 'failed' for me. One of them was the live performance of rock music by the actors, used as interludes. While it broke up the drama in a way that respected Genet's intention to disorientate, the transition of the actors into a student band didn't enhance the various themes and went on for two long. The other interruptions to the text (the director doing a spontaneous Q and A session, the video of Genet shouting about the BBC) were far more successful, intriguing in their own terms and shedding light on the play.

The other problem was that some of the acting was a little bland, in places. Genet gives his characters epic speeches, and some of these were delivered flatly.

Neither of these "failures" translated into making the whole play a failure. They did weaken the impact and, in the case of the musical numbers, made the play run long (when its impact as a series of short, sharp jabs is better served by a fast pace).

And, even though I am the most amazing critic of all time, I am sure that some people would not agree with me  - and would have a point. In fact, there is another critic, whom I rather respect, who thinks the exact opposite of me. But let's accept my reading for a moment.

Let's look at the bland acting. If bad acting involves forgetting lines, missing entrances and falling off the stage, this wasn't bad. Bland acting is when the lines are delivered, but there is no sense that the actor really understands their meaning.  It describes a lack of depth in the performance. In one of the crucial final speeches, the maid did not seem to really be experiencing an almost erotic terror at the thought of death, which is what I think the speech presents. It came across as a boring ramble.

If you are still with me, I hate to spend so much time concentrating on the disappointing. Especially when I am not sure how I am going to get out of this.

Now, the way that failures are treated is to isolate them, put them on YouTube and make a series of snappy comments.

But all that does is create an opposition. As a critic, I am supposed to chastise artists for their failures. I would rather engage in a dialogue.

There's no question that bland acting is not a pleasure to watch: I remember seeing Miriam Margoyles last year, and there's a delight in seeing her work a script through her talent. But here's a thing: Genet's original directions for his play insisted that the maids were played by young boys. Apart from the discomfort this would provide (the language is very sexualised) and the gender disjunction (are they men being women, women being men, or men playing men playing women or...), it would have ensured that the speeches were delivered blandly. Teenage boys would struggle to understand the dynamic of the maids' desires.

And part of Genet's overall plan is to confuse the audience. So, this failure is part of Genet's plan for success - success in this case meaning that the audience was undermined, distracted, made to recognise that they were watching a play, not a documentary.

Dylan said "there's no success like failure, and that's no success at all."

In The Maids, failure is part of the success: they cannot exist without each other. And not in a trite way, a sort of hippy platitude. Unless parts of the play fail, it cannot get across Genet's intentions.

And what if that applies on an even larger scale?