Existential Despair. Again

While I am not blaming Stewart Laing or Proto-Type Theatre, I am finding it hard to take joy in my existence in a hostile universe: both The Maids  and God, The Good and The Guillotine restated the French existentialist vision of a world careless towards the individual and the absence of intrinsic meaning. While the two plays offer very different solutions - The Maids craves death, with a side-order of personal ritual, 3G suggests a passive acceptance of circumstance - they share an unfaltering gaze into the abyss.

The Maids was written by Genet as a sort of brutal ritual, inflicting the antics of the oppressed on the audience to disorientate and disturb. Like Kane's Crave, it disrespects the boundaries of the fourth wall, not by addressing the audience, but by relocating the drama from stage into the mind of the viewer. The dizzying shifts of identity and gender, especially in the final scene when one of The Maids seems to be playing criminal and executioner at the same time, undermine the easy reading of the action: it's impossible to assess whether the slightly unengaged performances were a consequence of the actors' youth or a deliberate attempt to further alienate the performer from the script.

While Genet never aims for the taut precision of Camus, whose The Stranger inspired 3G, his language  is as disconcerting - a mixture of the eloquent, the gaudy and the blunt, it encourages the same sense of isolation and detachment. Unsettling and murderous, The Maids has left me in an existential fever, paranoid and exhausted.

God, The Good and The Guillotine - a work in progress, so full conclusions about its intentions must be tentative - didn't help. A ballad about the loss of a mobile phone made clear that Proto-Type are relocating Camus' alienation into a contemporary context. Technology is identified as the reason for the creeping sense of discomfort - in the source novel, the anti-hero's alienation is simply a reflection of his inability to feel emotion or see purpose.

There are works that celebrate the godlessness of existence, seeing the lack of absolute meaning as an opportunity for the individual to discover their own. As it stands, 3G is not one of those works. The most powerful moments - the phone song, the romping drinking song that is framed by blood splashing over the video screens - mismatch form and content to present alienation and present a world out of kilter with the individual.

These plays are undeniably powerful, but I am wondering whether I ought to cut back on the anguish. I know the circus is coming to town this week, and a few tricks and stunts must cheer me up. The problem with art is that if it is to be worth seeing, it needs to have an impact... but if the impact is so dark, I worry about the effect on my mental health.

Strange Days

How seriously should the opinions of a director about their work be taken? Barthes' declaration of the death of the author (effectively denuding an art work of context and personality beyond the text) is balanced by more traditional attempt to uncover the "real meaning" as intended by the creator (most passionately defended by the ever tactful Camille Paglia). For The Good, The God and The Guillotine, director Peter S Petralia insists that Camus' novel The Stranger is not pessimistic about the godlessness of the universe, but is a celebration of humanity's potential for free action.

Consequently, if Petralia's production is judged by his intentions, it is a complete failure. From the scene of angst caused by the loss of a mobile phone - wittily performed in a mixture of folk music theatricality and stadium rock lighting - to the fatalism of the finale, softly leaving the audience with a sense of death's inevitability, The Good, The God and The Guillotine exposes the horror at the core of life without God. The description of a walk to a church on a hot day - too slow invites sunburn, too fast can end in a chill - captures the impossibility of finding the happy medium in a hostile universe. Camus' text, here interpreted through electronic music and sophisticated scenography, is rarely optimistic. If Petralia fails in his intention, it is perhaps because The Stranger won't let him misread its meaning.

Ignoring Petralia's claims, however, leads to a far more successful production. This being a work-in-progress (around half of the projected scenes were shown at Tramway), there are signs that G3 grapples with the core anguish at the heart of Camus' novel. The cunning use of projections - blood revealing ink - over the scene that first involves The Stranger in the events that lead to his doom evoke the sinister tension of Camus' prose and the various mismatches of style (folk versus stadium rock, electronic beats against an cod-operatic recitative) evoke the alienation that Camus portrays in his characterisation. 

The Stranger is a perfect representation of his existential thought could inspire stunning art - yet it is fascinating that this anti-hero, a man who commits a racially aggravated murder, could be read as a hero. He does make a strong stand for atheism, bold and coherent, before anticipating his subsequent execution with relish. Unfortunately, he does this by beating up an annoying priest and casting death as "freedom" from the pain of living. 

Proto-Type Theater do manage to conjure a theatrical environment that speaks of alienation - a screen separates the audience from the stage, the musicians and actors generally keep to their own parts of the stage and their sporadic interactions are all the more dramatic for being rare. At its best G3 expresses the benign heartlessness of the universe, most poignantly in the observation of the sun's unwavering presence or the jolly singalong splattered in projected blood.

Verbatim Theatre? Bah! This is Verbatim Criticism

Tonight: Tramway's comeback continues with a triple threat of existential action: The God, The Good and The Guillotine. 

You are joining us now in our fortress of solitude, somewhere in Glasgow. With only three hours remaining to curtain up, Gareth K Vile and Eric Karoulla are your pre-show commentators.


Looking over the programme notes, what grabs you first, Eric?

The title. I'm guessing you want a bit more than that?

Yes.

It seems like another rule of three. And I don't know why these words have been picked. Then again, it's a work in progress.

Let's start with the good. I believe that you know your Plato better than I do... doesn't that give you something?

For Plato, good would be related to virtue, and probably the truth. I have a question. We all assume that when someone says the truth, we assume it is a concrete reality-  but everyone has their own reality, so how do we agree on what set truth?

Thanks, Eric. Nice easy one, there. We don't. For example, my truth is that we are talking about a piece at Tramway. Your truth seems to be "can I catch Gareth out with a very difficult question." I would like to remind you that my job is to be the obnoxious interrogator. You are here to contrast with me, being the being of charm and common sense. Given that, why don't we have a look at the Tramway website?

Sounds good.

Good. And God too, perhaps...

The Good, the God, and the Guillotine is a theatrical concert about belief, mortality, and morality that steals from the aesthetics of the gig, classical recitals and animation art. Questioning existence itself in a theatrical concert for three performers, three laptop musicians, and a reactive scenography of lights, objects and animations, The Good, the God, and the Guillotine is a dramatic and atmospheric exploration of our tangled relationships with technology.

Against a background of live, shifting animations, The Good, the God and the Guillotine responds to Albert Camus’ 1942 powerful novel L’Étranger (The Stranger). Prototype Theater (UK/US: ) are collaborating with the musicians and composers of the MMU Laptop Ensemble aka MMUle , lighting designer Rebecca MK Makus and animator/illustrator Adam York Gregory to create this music-driven performance that uses digital technology to craft an intertwining of song and narrative. Funding Credits: The Good the God and the Guillotine has been commissioned by Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (Lincoln), Manchester Metropolitan University (Crewe) and Tramway (Glasgow). Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

You've been having a cheeky wee keek at Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Was that because of this show?

Sort of. I started looked at works that might explain why we are looking at our relationship with technology. For example, the exhibition at the CCA is looking at our relationship to the economy. There's a lot of doubt going around.

Yes. But why did you drag up a French anarchist who is notoriously difficult to understand?

He was recommended to me by a friend who is an anarchist. He was talking about situationism which started in France in 1957. And it only survived fifteen years - it escalated in the 1968 riots in Paris.

And it was very influential on Malcolm McClaren when he arranged the Sex Pistols. I am not sure we are helping anyone with this. So far, I took us up one dead-end with Plato. 

Plato resounds very strongly in Debord. He keeps talking about representation. I actually took notes.

Yes. I am noting that this disaster is on my blog, not Eric's Trip. I am  all for experimental criticism, but this is just rambling. But. Here's the punch-line. I was trying to imitate the way that football commentators do the build up for a big match on TV. And I think we are as incoherent and irrelevant as they are. 

Yeah, probably. 

Still, we managed to mention the show, and print out the preview from the website. 

But the preview doesn't tell you very much.

No, but at least it didn't get lost in banter about Plato. Shall we just leave it?

You're the boss.