Aliens in the Arches: an Aristotlean Appreciation

The strict interpretation of the three unities - time, place and action - may not have been respected by the ancients (even Aeschylus liked the occasional change of scene), but the structure of Alien War pays careful respect to Aristotle's strictures. Located in the basement of an arts venue, the site of an alien incursion some twenty years earlier, the script is admirable in its simplicity. The protagonist, a burly marine, short on personality but big on ammunition, guides naive thrill seekers to the safety of the merchandising area.

The central agon, when the aliens breach a secured vessel, is concise: a burst of machine gun fire replaces the verbiose speechs, and the resolution is worked out not by the philosophical meanderings adored by Euripides but the true power of this world, the bullet. The traditional role of the chorus is taken by the audience - shades of Brecht in the comprehension rejection of the fourth wall - and the prologue becomes a series of safety announcements.

Despite the short running time, catharsis is, at least, partially achieved: there is no lack of fear when the big fucking alien emerges out of the wall, and the pity for the two teenage girls next to me is relieved only when I realise that their terror is ephemeral. Stripping away the expected features of theatre - the stage, the characterisation - allows this site specific -performance to attain an unusual intensity.
While a t-shirt may be a fine souvenir at the end, a better marketing tactic might be underpants featuring the distinctive alien logo, to replace the ones I just shittted.

Terminal Madness

While I am unlikely to ever develop a systematic theory of drama - I try now and again, but the other critics laugh at me, kindly - my resistance to the script as the foundation of theatre is fairly consistent. I like words well enough. Teaching Hamlet to teenagers didn't kill my joy of the Bard, it took uninspired directors to do that. And in the crop of new Scottish playwrights, a few names stand out for me: Martin O'Connor, Rob Drummond, Oliver Emmanuel, and not just because they are nice to me when I meet them in The Arches.

But I have amassed evidence that the director, the actors, even the lighting designer - if it happens to be Paul Sorley from Traway, especially the lighting designer - can be of equal, even greater importance. Two plays this week - The Abbey's Terminus at the Citizens, and Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco at the Tron - have reminded me why the rather British ideal of the page as blue-print for the stage frustrates me.

Terminus is everything I don't want theatre to be: gritty, verbose, grandiose and in rhyme. Author Mark O'Rowe appears so busy showing off the clever word-play that he forgets that characterisation comes as much from the way characters speak as story that they tell. There are three monologues - something I am less than enthusiastic about, since they miss out on relationships between characters that a simple conversation can bring - cleverly weaved together towards a vicious finale.  A women who escapes death, only to be killed by an angel; a shy man potters about killing women; an ex-teacher rescuing a former pupil out of guilt: they all hide in the dark, pop into the spotlight, tell their stories and disappear. And although the expense is obvious - great lights, great enunciation - the lack of drama in the script's form is elegantly expressed through a static staging. 

It may have a very Irish love of language - At Swim Two Birds, an adaptation by Blue Raincoat of some Flan O'Brien antics, shares Terminus' love of word-play, only energised by great direction - but Terminus mistakes violence for realism, and seems proud of gross-out imagery. Demons are made of worms, a nasty serial killer prowls, a pregnant woman gets raped with a broom and crushed under a speeding truck. The three performers are wasted on such ugly material and the moments of savage realism are undermined by the metaphysical plot involving sold souls taking revenge on their bodies, even before it all turns Death Race 2000.

Over at the Tron, Leann O'Kasi is dealing with a similar problem: three monologues, this time told in sequence. O'Kasi has rescued a poor script before - exactly a year ago, at the last Mayfesto - but Crazy Gary suffers from an overlong central yabber that patronises both the mentally ill and Christians. Of course, the three monologues link, there's plenty of stuff about small town frustrations and the consequences of school bullying. An incident round the back of the sports hall involving ingested semen is at the heart of it all - thanks to Gary Owen for that conceit - dooms all of the characters. O'Kasi keeps it sprightly, and the cast almost manage the Welsh accents - not that they needed to bother. There is nothing specifically Welsh about the plot. People get frustrated in small towns everywhere, and probably shit their pants on Fife rugby pitches as well. 

Every so often, I get called a prude for complaining about bad language or brutal imagery: for the record, I find people shitting themselves funny in real life, and love nothing more than stage nudity and self-harm. And I put my hand up to a special pleading. I forgot to get my happy pill prescription this week, and have been on one hell of a citalapram come-down. That added to my irritation at the central monologue - the character, who has been on years of medication, is no more than unlucky and a bit sleepless, while I have been numb all over, unable to sleep and paranoid since Friday. Owen has good some good ideas - small towns do breed odd hierarchies, and Crazy Gary is a very recognisable thug. The scene where the deluded cabaret singer performs You've Lost That Loving Feeling while experiencing the actual emotions, without realising, is crafty and evocative.  And in the first and last monologues, the conflicts between desire and fear are profound. Even if Crazy Gary ends up glassed and bleeding, he is both a monster and vaguely sympathetic, as trapped by his past as the boy he made lick up his pal's jism. Plus it has a superb opening line. 

Both Terminus and Crazy Gary have great sets - a little melodramatic with the light design, but enticing, while the directors are battling against a form that is inherently undramatic once it goes beyond ten minutes. Crazy Gary is enjoyable and insightful at points - mostly when it is being humorous, or capturing the low level misery of co-dependent relationships - but lacks a good editor. It rambles when it could strike, and gets lost in the minutiae of plotting the links between the the characters.

The Tron cast are exceptionally good at catching Owen's Big Dramatic Moments, like the final ruck or the karaoke championship. And unlike Terminus, the connections are, at least, subtle and telling: the bully beats up the karaoke man who gives the cabaret singer his moment of glory, and the female romantic interest - never performed, but spoken about - is a ghostly, sinister presence in all three monologues. There is also a sense that all of the characters are delusional, untrustworthy, and the shifts in their versions of the day undermine each other's perceptions. This universe is far more interconnected than  Terminus' world, despite the latter's complex metaphysics of Satan, souls and avenging angels.

All six actors in both plays come across well, and Terminus' direction follows the self-consciously iconic nature of the script. O'Kasi keeps her actors on the move, and despite the running time, the pace rarely slackens. My grand project to systematise my understanding of good theatre falters in both works: a straight description of both plays would praise the performers, the sets, the directors, even the theatres for programming bold content. And Crazy Gary has a strong relevance, opening up debates on how it is not school learning that shapes us, but socialisation. And yet the scripts have such weaknesses that it might be true that they are the foundation. In this case, they are as sandy as any parable's ground.

Sell Out? Kiss off!

I am young enough to be excited by new music, but old enough to be irritated by stupidity. This week, I am in a massive temper about an article by Kissy Sell Out in that tabloid version of the Independent – you know, that one that has articles about itself as “the best loved tabloid broadsheet”, sells for 20p and has bad haikus instead of news.

I am pretty naive about popular music – last week, My Producer Harry shouted at me for playing The Swedish House Mafia on our radio show, since they have been hyped by Radio 1 – but Kissy Sell Out might become my nemesis. I had better listen to his show sometime. Although he has debated at the Cambridge Union – against Stephen Fry, whose tweets about having a shit having been mistaken for some kind of contemporary philosophy – I doubt Kissy is best represented by his article in the paper. He is trying to make some point about classical music having had its day. Apparently, because he noticed that The Farm – a dodgy Liverpudlian boys band that somehow got tangled in the arse hair of the Madchester scene – used a melody from Pachelbel, classical music is exposed as elitist. He goes on to say that the act of “writing music down” isn’t as vibrant as recording it. Because classical music is notated, it isn’t as good as Kissy’s radio show.

I’ll be talking about Kissy’s Cambridge debate in another article – coming soon, and it might actually mention The Kronos Quartet, who are the putative subject of this week’s gay ramble. In the meantime, I’ll just rant about a few of Kissy’s Big Ideas. One is that classical music is elitist, while youth culture is all about inclusion.  Another is his belief that recorded sound is more authentic than the music made from a score. He doesn’t consider live performance at all. Being the sort of person who thinks the name Kissy Sell Out is cool, his grasp of language is pretty weak, too. For the record, I was born Vile, and when my sentences get out of control, I haven’t taken my medication.

My Producer Harry and I are trying to resolve our playlist struggles on the Vile Arts Radio Hour. I want to cover gigs that are happening around Glasgow, but this has left our selections uneven. And it doesn’t help that I play stuff without always listening to it first. Into this combustible mixture comes Perfecting Sound Forever, a history of recording that Harry has been reading, and I stole from him while he was trying to fix the sound on an interview I messed up. Although this is a very practical conversation – we are trying to develop a radio show that our listeners might enjoy – it quickly gets into me showing off about having read Plato once, and blood being spilt over the exact relationship between musical fashion and technological advance.

Two interesting points did emerge, right into Kissy’s theses. One is that recorded sound is frequently fraudulent, imitating the sound of a band but made by musicians playing at separate times, and multi-tracked beyond any chance of live replication, and that various sound tests, right back to Edison’s day, were about as scientifically valid as homeopathy.  The other is that any musical choice we make – say, including tonnes of stuff that is connected to Winning Sperm Party or Cry Parrot, or my insistence on working a regular dubstep track into the Hour – has to involve consideration of what audience we are including or excluding. The irony is that one of the show’s foundations is inclusion, that opera and classical bump alongside electronica and new Glasgow bands like the wonderful Holy Mountain. The show is all about widening the remit, crossing over into new scenes, and making connections. It’s why I play doom cabaret songs about book burning by the Creative Martyrs over Steve Reich’s Different Trains or the dialect poetry of Martin O’Connor over MC Lars. That, and I am unsteady on the cross-fader.

But as someone who supports eclecticism and diversity, I can’t buy Kissy’s idea that youth cultures have always been about inclusion – or, as he suggests “music scenes that transcend social boundaries should surely be of the utmost importance in youth culture”.  Optimistically citing jazz halls as the foundations of ant-racism in the 1920s and the importance of Live Aid, music has, for Kissy, “quite literally changed the world”.

If you are a social worker, then yes, transcending social boundaries is important. If, on the other hand, you actually belong to a youth culture, those who are excluded are as important as those included. Once upon a time, before the music business became a career choice, rock’n’roll was about pissing off parents, rebelling. Mods and Rockers didn’t ruck down Brighton beach to transcend social boundaries. And NWA didn’t bang on about being gangsters to develop a community. Ideas like cool and exclusivity have high value in music. And the rave culture Kissy praises was not all about high-minded social mobility. It was about taking shitloads of drugs until you thought everyone was cool, except for the police who kicked the shit out of us when we protested for our “right to party”.

Kissy praises the web-culture that has made music accessible – and has encouraged the sort of eclecticism we can agree to love. But he has that annoying ahistoricity of the Sunshine Generation  - of the sort that doesn’t understand why Pearl Jam weren’t as good as Nirvana for anyone actually around during The Grunge Years  -  with a Wikipedia entry in place of research, and optimistic platitude in place of considered opinion.  He ignores what he cannot accommodate – that youth culture is fierce and exclusive – and aims to transcend boundaries by making fatuous divisions between elitist classical and popular chart tunes. Yet Kissy celebrates those acts who have used classical music as a motif. Sadly, he includes Malcolm Maclaren’s Fans, which misappropriated both opera and hip-hop. It’s a shame he doesn’t include the follow up, which tried to match funk and waltz, despite their different time signatures, and lyrics about women’s tits. His argument against classical music seems to be based on identifying its influences on pop.

As for his emphasis on the “visceral power of a sound recording”... I just give up. I honestly don’t understand what he is talking about. He appears to be saying that listening to a recording is better than reading the notes on a page. Kissy’s argument is a bit like saying that looking at dirty Polaroid of an ex isn’t as intimate as having sex with your girlfriend, so feminism is a bad thing. It takes something obvious and spuriously links it to another idea.

Harry and I have at least read a book about this, and I’ll pretend I know what compression means. We are a bit suspicious about the hegemony of recorded sound, and I am trying to connect this to my various conspiracy theories about late consumerism and the removal of choice. In short, the recording is an artefact, ready for sale and consumption. I don’t like art being reduced to a commodity, especially when the commodification is hidden. Before I get as tangled in language as he does, I’ll conclude that Kissy’s advocacy of recorded sound is a typical example of how late capitalism uses the rhetoric of romanticism to sell us crap. That’ll be why he is on Radio 1 and in the national papers, and I write a blog. He’s a shill for corporate interests. And in an act of anti-consumerist fervour, I am going to listen to Radio 3.