Volcanic Dramaturgy: Paul Davies @Edfringe 2015

The Fringe

What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
Paul Davies: This production was inspired by a number of things. I will list them in no particular order:

(a) The possibility of filling an empty building with 3 tons of coal.
(b) The discovery of a very short, surreal story written by a miner in 1947.
(c) The anniversary of the miners’ strike
(d) The sense that work (or art) as action is disappearing from our lives.
(e) The Belgian artist, Gwendoline Robin.

Why bring your work to Edinburgh?We have been bringing work to Edinburgh since 1988 when we performed at the Gateway Centre which was a building owned/managed by Jimmy Boyle. We have come approximately 13 times to the Fringe during this time. We come to connect to the world and the theatre community more generally.

What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production? 

The audience see and stand upon a lot of coal. There will be fire and power tools. It will be cold, loud and occasionally funny. They will hear fragments of stories from four characters – Betty Rae Watkins, Joseph Herman, Dai Alexander and David Martin. 

Some of these stories will be in English, some in Welsh and some in Spanish. I hope that the audience will be intrigued to think about what they are seeing and ask what kind of theatre is this? And what kind of story is this Welsh company telling ? 

 I hope that they think about how a country’s past is contested and that our memories of how we live and what was done (by whom and to whom) are the very stuff of what it is to be human. Finally I hope they think “God that was good. I’d like to have been part of that!”

Dramaturgy
As far the relevance of this goes: it depends what we mean by it. If it means thinking, critical or humanistic or just of the occasional sort then clearly we can all subscribe to it. 

If it means structuring a piece of work so that the narrative or purposes of the authors are more clear I guess we can subscribe to this too. Of course dramaturgy is often in place to protect a script from the director. 

We don’t really need this in the UK as the playwright is in a relatively powerful position. Power is relative and so too perhaps is the thinking of the dramaturg.

Influences and Traditions
Volcano were heavily bound up with physical interpretations of texts. Artaud for beginners, politics too. Particularly connected to the work of Nigel Charnock who directed a number of our early classic black box shows. 

Punk and politics. We have also performed a number of shows in spaces outside of theatres. Especially as we have a building ourselves. 

We don’t really see ourselves as vectors or carriers of any particular tradition or way of making theatre. Dissenters, outsiders, marginal proponents of lumber!

Process

Most processes stick with the particularity of the text or theme(s) that one is seeking to articulate. Having said that of late – risk is at the centre of the process. 

How can we as actors demonstrate that this counts – that this is live and happening now. It is good to do what you cannot do. The other part of the process that is important is to surprise the audience and yourself. 

Finally keep some things secret – why you do this or refer to that; some things are best not said- we can at best hint at them, even to ourselves they might remain unknown.

Audience

Without the audience we are just talking to ourselves. Art and theatre articulate an increasingly private, arcane language. This does in fact happen. 

The converse is also true, art and theatre can just burble on not saying very much distinctive or challenging at all. To prevent these twin threats from really taking hold, we need the audience. The audience confers meaning upon a theatre piece. Without an audience we are depressed and dying.

Is Dramaturgy the bastard cousin of Jurgen Habermas ? Is it, in other words, a part of the project of rationality and knowledge that Habermas and co have been so painstakingly documenting or is dramaturgy better understood as a set of discrete, ill-formed, accidental, almost poetic codes?

I know where I stand, do you?

Flat earth news

I'm sure I read it somewhere... hang on, here we go.

The internet is killing newspapers.

I've heard that a great deal. Never having worked for a newspaper - except the big-on-integrity/low-on-catchment area G41 - I'm not quite sure who said it. But it seems a truism. The rise of the internet, and bloggers like me, who give it away, has destroyed the professionals who charge for it. 

Only, I read a book I got out of Cancer Research on Sauchiehall

Street. It is called Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, and it has its own website. It suggests an alternative reason for the collapse of newspapers.

They haven't been doing their bloody job properly.

Apart from a plethora of statistics that gave me a headache - translated, they show that there are less journalists, doing more work, on bigger newspapers - Davies follows the adventures of modern journalism, and pursues a damning idea. In the last thirty years (coinciding with Thatcherism and the free market yabber), the owners of newspapers have destroyed a fine tradition of investigative reporting and getting pissed in the pub at lunchtime. They have replaced it with a commercial imperative. They has pressured the journalists into becoming hacks.

The proprietors are making scads of cash. They do not plough it back into the editorial and reporting teams. They have shareholders, mistresses and dubious members of the establishment to pay off instead.

Davies makes a great stand for the ideal of truth in journalism - bit naive in the post-modern era, but still. He uncovers a bunch of scandals that managed to escape the full extent of the law, describes a Press Complaints Commission that is as effective as my blindfolded mum doing the shopping on roller-skates. He marks the changes of The Times' Insight team (once a real 'truth to power' gang) and the antics of Paul 'Vagina Monologue' Dacre at The Daily Mail (it seems that their right-wing tantrums are part of a systemic dysfunction and not just ironic articles tossed off by giggling reporters).

Ironically, I believe Davies without having any way of checking his veracity. It is this quality of credulity - or laziness - that he identifies as the chief curse of the modern newspaper. No-one can bother their arse to check a story (even if they had time, which they don't, because Paul Dacre or someone is shouting that they are a cunt behind them). 

Most of the shenanigans that Davies describes - my favourite is probably the story of how The Daily Mail decided that two women, who had been acquitted of a crime were, in fact, guilty and ought to be in prison because some gangster reckoned they were - happened before blogging was a major thing. The newspapers were fucking the public trust long before I came along and offered stupid reviews of local plays. The decay set in - funnily enough - about the time Rupert Murdoch got hold of The Times.

Other highlights of the book include that time Andrew 'Brillo Pad' Neil managed to let a source for an important article get abducted by the Israeli state (they used a honey-trap, while Brillo couldn't even give the poor bugger pocket money). Obviously, Brillo wasn't directly responsible for the chap getting dragged to Rome on the promise of a bunk-up, but his dithering on how to proceed and protect the source didn't help.

The war on terror gets a bit of page time too. I didn't realise that it was possible for someone to become a one-legged fanatic danger to the world just through the combination of press releases and lazy reportage. I'm going to get the MOD to do a press release that says I am suspected of having a hot-line to God and that my critiques are the only ones that are accurate and absolutely true, ever. 

If the internet, the bloggers, are killing newspapers - I have suddenly become much prouder of my work. Of course, the journalists whom I know are all arts writers or sub-editors, and they are honest and hard-working specialists (they don't have the kind of jobs where writing bullshit to order matters, and they have a dedication to the arts which allows them more freedom, if not money). It's a shame that the good bits of newspapers (the art section and the cricket, except when they interview Chris De Burgh) are getting dragged into a commercial and moral morass.

See you on the funny pages. huh?