Marcus Roche Interview 2012

A little over a year ago, Marcus Roche was a guest on my radio show... chatting about a production as part of Mayfesto, an adaptation of To A God Unknown, John Steinbeck's novel of faith and the wide open spaces of America. A year later, and he is back at the Tron, director of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. He had a big hit during the Fringe with that, and I am still trying to untangle the questions it posed.

However, I just discovered this old interview that I had done with him, and it reminds me of three things.

1. Roche was utterly charming and enthusiastic about the power of theatre to make changes.
2. Being on the Radio Hour is a first step to sudden success, except for me.
3. Mayfesto has been consistently political in all of its editions.

And over to Roche...



What made Mayfesto a good platform for this particular piece ?

Mayfesto at the Tron has had a focus on personal politics. In To a God Unknown the main character is finding out about his own relationship with the land and his faith. Showing a piece of such personal journey of discovery to a Mayfesto audience seems really appropriate.

 Are there any other pieces in the festivals that you either think compares to A God, or that you are especially keen to see (and why?)

I think To A God Unknown is a universal story about people trying to make sense of their surroundings and in that it might share with Minute After Midday and No Time for Art 0 + 1. I've recently been in contact with two other Egyptian directors I’ve really been struck by how profoundly the revolution has altered the way they see the world. There is a lot of confronting the truth in this programme, which is very exciting.

I also am really keen to see some of the other work that is being developed like Chalk Farm and Scenes Unseen and I’m really interested in seeing what Springtime turns out to be. I am always enthused by the diversity of the rehearsed readings that are showcasing work in various stages.

 What is your role at the tron at the moment?

I'm working as a producer on placement in the Tron to help bring together a Glasgow-wide theatre festival for the next year.

How do you think that this edition of mayfesto has evolved from earlier years?

I feel this Mayfesto has put a focus on international work coming here while showcasing what Glasgow has to say about the world. These are two key themes that we are hoping to develop for next year’s festival.

Works in Progress (A Sort of Apology)

I don’t have a problem with the idea of works-in-progress. Back in the 1990s, a great many of the big names of international theatre would tour their latest opus as a work in progress, learning from the mistakes and the audience, yet delivering memorable performances. And for emerging artists, they are vital: a space for learning, taking risks, or reminding the public that they exist.

I know that any attempt to discuss the frequency of works-in-progress gets very close to economic questions. They are cheaper than a full-scale production and in the current financial blah blah blah…

There’s nothing wrong with them, and there is certainly nothing worth bullying in any individual WiP. As long as they are fairly advertised – and priced – nobody loses.

What I am bothered by is how many there seems to be at the moment. Alongside the clustering of festivals, which are run on minimal cost by dedicated and brave curators, and often feature work by unpaid artists, the WiP has become the most obvious response to the contemporary credit crunch.  The rise of the DIY ethos, with its roots in punk and the “let’s do the show right here” romance of the musicals, prizes the immediate over the polished (and the veneer of polish, famously, can’t be applied to dog faeces) and blurs the line between incomplete and deliberately rough around the edges.

Here’s the thing: I’m a critic, and I’ll go to anything. I get sick if I have to sit in my house. Without an almost daily infusion of art, I begin to dwell on the mundane details of my life, and think about how I seriously need to tidy my bedroom before the rats gnaw through the protective barrier of dirty clothes that surrounds my bed.

Audiences are more discerning, and they are not going to be satisfied by the WiP. They want to see the money up there on the stage. Going to see a work in progress ‘by accident’ might not be a good thing. Unless the audience fully engaged with the process of making art, a WiP might come across as a shambles.

Of course, the audience most fully engaged with the creative process is “other artists.” The WiP and the DIY could be in danger of creating an audience made up of artists, and no one else.

In conclusion, I am thinking aloud. I like works in progress, but worry that they set up a cycle of artists watching artists making work for artists who watch artists and….

The Past is Haunting Me Like Marxist Language

There is a spectre that haunts the contemporary arts. It whispers dark mockery in the ear of the conceptualist, hobbles the choreographer and detunes the melodies of the composer. Anxiety of influence isn’t merely the late night panic attack striking down the critic as he tries to say something original about yet another rendition of Macbeth. It grows in a straight line from 1913’s Rite of Spring, which both heralded the arrival of the contemporary age and offended a conservative public, through to Andy Warhol and the 1960s, when it became the popular and froze a generation into a series of strategies that replaced genuine experimentation.

The failure of originality has become a strategy in itself. The current celebrations and reflections on The Rite’s anniversary only underline how this moment in the arts’ history has become a symbol of potential and a headstone for experimentation. Rob Drummond’s Riot of Spring was a sideways look at the way in which Stravinsky’s music has become part of the establishment – the music is now protected by copyright to such an extent that even displaying the score on stage is illegal. Meanwhile, Gob Squad’s Kitchen simultaneously praises the potential of Warhol’s cinema and mourns the loss of the innocent spirit that allowed such bold experiments.

Post-modernism, still a vital interpretative philosophy doesn’t help. The emphasis on a diversity of opinions and its distrust of sincerity can encourage artists towards trivial positions – any grand narrative is fundamentally dishonest. Taylor Mac, as part of his recent show at The Arches, observed that self-consciousness has destroyed the unashamed intensity that drove much of the pop music before the 1990s: the irony that permits the most absurd lyric to be readmitted to the musical cannon also cripples the modern song-writer. The continued distaste for U2 is as much about their brazen sincerity as the predictable sound of their latest album.

Simon Reynolds pokes around in the contemporary confusion in his book Retromania, but the problems he detects are not limited to music. Indeed, although he takes up the story implied in the name of indie-dance also-rans Pop Will Eat Itself, pop music is the art least damaged by the trend towards recycling of ideas.

Even in its early years, rock’n’roll was all about reworking older ideas, and the cult of the artist maintains at least the aura of originality. Drummond, in an interview before his Riot, talks about the impossibility of creating something genuinely new. Like many theatre-makers, he is interested in experimentation. Yet he is honest enough to recognise that he is caught within a tradition, and that “the new” is usually a mere variation on a theme.

Gob Squad are even more explicit in Kitchen. Basing their performance on a series of Warhol’s films – including the one about the blow job, Kitchen itself and his series of screen tests – they are simultaneously sentimental about the freedoms of the 1960s and ambivalent about its social and aesthetic impact. While their Kitchen takes on a diverse range of themes, including the battles between youth and experience, audience and artists, it seems to mourn the last moment in which true experimentation was possible.

The signs of an artistic culture in crisis, a crisis that can only come about when there is a sense that everything has been done, are manifold. Last year, every other production at the Fringe seemed to be a version of Macbeth. Never mind that some versions – Song of the Goat’s polyphonic spree, David Greig’s imaginative sequel Dunsinane – added new readings. A proliferation of Shakespeare hints at a theatre tied up with the past and lacking confidence in the present, or even the recent past. It’s more miserable in that Macbeth has elements that are utterly irrelevant to contemporary life – the plot is driven by a concern about regal hereditary, a matter of interest to Prince Charles but not leaders of terrorist cells.

Then there are the works-in-progress. Again, this isn’t a question of individual pieces relative quality: far too much work is being offered in a tentative, incomplete state. That critics have taken to treating works-in-progress as completed is problematic: there have been five star reviews of shows that are being presented with actors still reading from the script. Combine this with the pieces that explicitly take other works as their guiding idea, and theatre isn’t just eating itself, it’s becoming a middle class version of Two Girls, One Cup.

And the festival is becoming the unit of artistic presentation: plays are clustered together, hiding from individual exposure. All of these strategies are valid, intriguing, and there are good performances in the mix. But taken together, they suggest a certain aesthetic cowardice.

It’s worth saying that no individual work of art – especially those that get mentioned here – is necessarily an act of cowardice in itself. And the strategies being used by the artists don’t imply a capitulation of either ambition or seriousness. Rather, there are trends in art that reflect a cultural malaise. It’s bold to attempt any analysis of this malaise, but sitting through five or six plays that use reproduction of past songs to make a political point tends to lead to grand statements. And if the problem is a lack of ambition, perhaps it is time for a critic to make a ridiculous and large theory, the better to be shot down by artists making work that argues with the contention that “art is being hamstrung by its own self-conscious awareness of the past.”

END OF PART ONE

Oh Please, Just Stop: Critical Process Pondered. Again.

In a recent article in The Metro, when asked to respond to the increased importance of social media in the critical process, Barry Norman claimed that "the biggest obligation is to the readers, viewers and listeners," and defines honesty as the criteria for a "good reviewer." While it is a clear and solid piece of advice for critics, it doesn't really address the article's core issue - that the internet has allowed everyone to think that they are a critic. His subsequent comment ("the professional critic should have seen a hell of a lot more films than the amateur") gets closer to the point, although whether my obsessive viewing of Pasolini really helps me to judge  Iron Man 3 is a moot point.

Being prone to introspection, Norman has set me off thinking about the purpose of criticism. Since The Metro article ends with the opinions of a film PR, there's the underlying assumption that a review's main purpose is either attracting or warning off potential audiences. That works for film (and albums), which might explain why movies and music get more space in traditional press. Unfortunately, there's a fair proportion of theatre that won't get long enough runs to need a glowing press commendation.

It is a pretty esoteric question - why do I think theatre criticism is worth spending my life on? - but it might answer some of the questions about my own subjectivity. Sure, my enthusiasms for Jesuit spirituality, scientific method and classical Greek theatre are bound to inform my opinions - as are the relative tightness of my belt and the comfort of my seat. But in the last few weeks, I have noticed that my opinions on certain performances, which aren't necessarily in accord with either audience reaction or the other critics (whom I respect), can be related to my belief in the nature of criticism.

Admittedly, I probably took my faith a little far when I shouted that the job of the critic is to be a witness ("in both a legal and religious sense," I hollered, much to the bemusement of my fellow passengers on the train into Glasgow). And it does go back to my undergraduate study of ancient tragedy: I regard art as the place where ideas get discussed, and the critical process is the further discussion of those ideas.

So, something like Poke or Wuthering Heights (both winners of The Arches Platform 18 Award) are both "my kind of theatre." It's not even that I agree with the politics in the pieces - Poke's representation of masculinity frightens me, because it might be true and the penis might be mightier than the mind. But against Scottish Ballet's revival of Highland Fling, they are all about forwarding conversations. I've been deliberately mentioning them in fragments across the blog, never making any real aesthetic judgments but alighting on ideas, letting them sit. Highland Fling, meanwhile, is a bit of a laugh, but I am not sure it has that much to say about Scottish identity or the nature of erotic fixation - a more aesthetic analysis would be closer to the choreographer's intentions.

I have also been left feeling uncomfortable about plays that inhibit the conversation around a subject. Quiz Show is full of fantastic facts - yet to discuss its core issue is to give away the twist in the tale. At risk of invoking Plato (and revealing my relative idiocy), I have a moral problem with this - not an aesthetic one.

But this is my problem - not theatre's. It might help to explain why I prefer certain productions, or excuse my frequent failure to include those essential features of the review ("this actor was good, that director was imaginative"). I am throwing out a few questions - the joy of a blog is never concluding, never conforming to the format of beginning, middle and end...

Musings (Feel Free to Ignore)

I am always wondering about the purpose of criticism. Frankly, that's just an application of my general feeling of existential dread to the task in hand. I wonder about the point of life most of the time - sometimes in the positive, student manner, when it becomes a matter of joy and experiment. Other days, I look back at my reviews - especially my early ones - and wonder what the hell I was thinking, and how I could be so unpleasant about the striving of my fellow humans.

Traditionally, the critic has been all about the review: here's a few words explaining what happened in the theatre, and here's my aesthetic opinion. Now and again, there's a more political edge to the review - certain magazines might be fairly predictable in their allegiances and bias. But the review stands to give potential punters a quick overview of whether they ought to invest time and money in the action.

By the time I got around to seeing Gary McNair's latest, the punters had already decided: it was sold out. I was glad about that: Donald Robertson really impressed me, and set a very high standard for the rest of the NTS' Auteurs programme. Having seen McNair's early work, Donald Robertson felt like the culmination of McNair's explorations of the monologue. His persona was tighter, even when he consciously undermined himself and his ideas about the power of comedy were clear and brutal. 

Looking at McNair's previous pieces, like Crunch or Count Me In, it is surprising that he hasn't joined in with another more obviously political piece (he even turned up in Lyn Gardner's round-up of political theatre a few months back). Surprising and admirable - to be honest, I didn't want to hear a monologue about independence - but the shift towards social rather than political drama paid dividends. However charming McNair can be on stage (he can charm old ladies into ripping up hard cash), political monologues can be alienating. There are a few artists knocking about around Scotland at the moment, whom I adore and respect, but I fear that they might start talking about independence at any moment.

Getting back on task - my review of McNair won't be persuading anyone to go and see it - too late - unless the NTS and The Arches decide he is worth a second production (and it totally is). But I am interested in reviewing work like this from another perspective: what is its context, and how does it relate to that context. I think I want to be a post-structuralist: looking at how the environment shapes  something's creation, then how it shapes the environment back. Or, to put it another way (before I look up post-structuralism on wikipedia and find out that isn't what it means): the critical discourse manifested within the popular review embodies a dialectic between the created art work and the precreated context within which it is contained. 

Using clear, coherent language, eh? 

How Many Critics Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?

I guess everyone thinks that they are better than average. I thought that I was the life and soul of the party, the man most likely to spin out the witty one-liner or hold the gang's attention with a comic monologue about Belgian avant-garde theatre. While I can cope being bested over the odd gag (Kieran Hurley's reponse when I mentioned that I had broken my glasses whilst reading Marx - "destroying the Spectacle again?" - was today's winner). But I am bummed to find out that I am, in fact, as dour as a Presbyterian preacher watching Jay and Silent  Bob Strike Back.

I might as well start with the punch-line, since I can't tell jokes. I was watching Tramadol Nights  and, despite Frankie Boyles' oddly amiable rudeness, I found large chunks of the show - especially the sketches - both not funny and offensive. The introduction, in which Frankie holds forth to a captive audience, sets the tone. He picks on various people in the front rows, without allowing them to respond. Only Frankie is allowed to talk: heckles like, say "the tramp's beard doesn't hide how much of your schtick you've stolen from Jerry Sadowitz," are not permitted.  It is a dismal comedy of contempt.

Then I watched Reginald D Hunter on YouTube. Again, Hunter seems to be likable, and comes across in interviews as being aware of the importance of humour for breaking taboos. But I find his routine about rape obnoxious and ignorant - with bonus irritation for trying to invoke science as a rationalisation for claiming forced sex has an evolutionary function.

To be clear: I don't want either comedian banned or censored. I know that Boyle's routine was removed from Children in Need thanks to a turn about the queen but not having your jokes on an international platform is not censorship, anymore than a film being given an eighteen certificate. I'll probably watch both comedians again, since I value the bits where they are funny more than the offense they cause me. The only response to offensive art is to create counter art. If I were funny, I'd be sketching a routine about Hunter and Boyle being in love with each other.

Not that I would see their putative homosexuality as being wrong or any less valid than their obvious love for the queen or themselves.

Both comedians are self-aware - Boyle was quick to sue when accused of racism, and these quotes from Hunter are unlikely to be matched in the back pages of Jim Davidson's joke book. They just happen to go over my personal moral event horizon. Fortunately, my lack of a sense of humour is probably a function of my tedious liberalism, and I guess I'll defend their right to say these things at the same time I moan that I don't like them.

Besides, have you seen the size of those guys?

Buzzcut and Broken Glass

It is perfectly possibly that my Bad Sunday - caused by sitting on my glasses while reading an introduction to Marx - is the result of a punishment for my cynicism about the Sunday Assembly. Fortunately, they won't believe in supernatural justice, so I can develop a conspiracy theory that the Catholic Church objected to my comparison of the Vatican to the BBC.

My current limited vision, aside from expressing my critical identity in a literal motif that would probably delight fans of Shakespeare, has cut into my review time at Buzzcut. I have been struggling anyway: the variety of work, the sheer volume of artists and the number of performers who are offering either works in progress or are at an early stage of their career slices across a simple approachof star rating individual turns. Besides, the posters are asking how an even can strengthen a community. If this is the intention of the festival, this question can only really be answered after the dust has settled - and from within.

Buzzcut  has never been short in ambition. Last year, it appeared to emerge in response to the absence of New Territories, a festival of experimental theatre that had introduced Glasgow to artists from Michael Clark through to Franko B. Buzzcut was clear that it did not intend to replace NT: the financial support behind the latter had allowed it to important major names from around the globe. Buzzcut is far more focussed on emerging artists - and local creators. But it made a fierce statement of independence, tipping its hat to the DIY ethos so strong in Glasgow, and encouraging artists from different genres, not necessarily associated with the Live Art that defines New Territories. By stressing the ideal of building and maintaining community, it presented a specific vision of what art is.

Fortunately, this year it includes the Black Sun Drum Corp. I'll be able to hear them, even if I can't see.

Both festivals and works in progress are worth further discussion - they are becoming the predominant format of theatre and related arts, lately... as soon as my eyes adjust to the short distance, I think I need to consider how I approach them.

Religion and Science (I just had to say it. You don't have to read it)

Just to clarify, following my last post about religion and science: I believe in evolution as a fact, and natural selection as the most likely theory to explain its process. I prefer the label “Mendelian” to “Darwinian” as the guy who worked out how genetics operated doesn’t get enough respect.

To follow that up, I find the continued battle between supporters of Intelligent Design and Darwinians intensely tedious. As a theatre critic, I can only see bad drama. The most interesting work in this area comes from scientists who are also Christians, trying to explain natural selection to other Christians. If we can all pretend that this is what I am doing, I’ll feel less guilty about adding to the pile of bad writing on the topic.

My instinct is to side with the atheists-who-support-natural-selection. They share my worldview. Equally, my instinct is against Christian fundamentalists. Not only do they maintain a stubborn resistance to the inevitable rise of science as an ontological arbiter, they go out of their way to read The Bible in a manner that is contrary to The Bible’s purpose.

I thought I would start off with a little gift to the atheist debater. The next time the whole Genesis versus Natural Selection row begins, don’t simply throw alternative scripture at them. It doesn’t work: their belief is in God as Author, not Darwin as Philosopher.

Instead, deconstruct the ground of Creationism. Without Genesis, the argument falls apart.

First of all, read the damn thing. Read right up until Adam and Eve get thrown out of Eden. And here’s the first surprise: there are two creation myths.

The early books of the Old Testament (from this point inwards, to be called The Torah) are a compilation. That’s obvious enough – look at the different styles, and diversity of books. But within Genesis, there has been editing. Two distinct traditions (P and J, theory fans) have been put together. They had different creation myths.

It gets better. The two myths have very different agenda. One is the classic: God makes the world, has a snooze. The other gets into that Adam’n’Eve reverse burlesque. The first is closer to the fundamentalist’s idea (“this is how the world was made, sunshine. Now can we talk about something more important, like how much of your income belongs to the church?”). The second is an attempt to understand why the world is a bit crap.

It’s nice and easy to use this titbit as a diamond cut. You know: “if The Bible is literally true, which one of these versions is the right one?”

Resist that temptation, oh my brethren. Claims about truth are what make this argument so complicated.

Being a post-modernist, I have no qualms about my next trick. In the magic of contemporary dance, there’s a strategy employed by the best choreographers. The first ten minutes or so – the introduction – are used to give the audience a taste of what the work is going to be all about.

This technique is more common than just the magic of contemporary dance. Novelists do it: here’s the hero, or anti-hero. Playwrights do it (Rob Drummond sets up the tone and drama of Quiz Show in the first scene, by having a generic quiz show go subtly wrong).

The most well known use of this technique is foreshadowing, or Chekov’s Gun. That’s a slightly more obvious version. And doesn’t classical composition have something called a Prelude, to sketch out the musical territory?

I might be using the wrong word, but I think that this part of The Bible is programmatic. In the first chapters, the reader is being introduced to the best way to read and understand the whole narrative. In other words, the conscious choice by the editors to include two versions of creation attempts to encourage the reader to interpret.

Approaching both myths seriously presents a series of choices. If they are both true, then the question becomes: what does truth mean? If the stories are competing, then the only solution is for the readers to work it out for themselves.  

This isn’t just an abdication of responsibility on the part of the editors – throwing their hands up in despair at which version is true and deciding to let the reader decide. It is a deliberate insistence that truth is not simple, and that only through dialogue (in this case, between two stories) can truth emerge.

The creation myths of Genesis are a bit like a caveat at the start of The Bible saying: WORK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF. INTERPRET, THINK, CONSIDER.

A couple of hundred years later, another bunch of editors go the same route. Only this time, they put in four versions of the same story.

It’s just a bit much to insist that The Bible is literally true when its editors recognised the problems of the unreliable narrator over two thousand years before the modern literary critic.

(Although Ovid did say the same thing about Odysseus…)

I don’t see this trick as really undermining scriptural authority. It just encourages literalists to show the text the respect it deserves.

Not a Proper Christian

Yes, I am trying to start a conversation.

Within my lifetime, science has become the dominant public intellectual paradigm. The claims of fundamentalist Christianity not withstanding, it has become the primary author on matters both ontological and social. Atheism, once a minority interest, has become a badge of pride and although its connection to science isn’t absolute, scientific thought is frequently invoked to defend it.

Unfortunately, there is a widespread misunderstanding of what science is. Contrary to popular belief, science is not a bunch of facts and theories. Science is defined by its use of a method: the investigation of the universe through experimentation. Taking the conclusions from these experiments and repeating them does not make a person a scientist, anymore than a parrot quoting Hamlet’s Great Speech is an actor.

When Christian fundamentalists attack science – ostensibly to defend their literal readings of The Bible – they complain that scientific truth is in a constant state of flux. While their alternative authority is increasingly unpalatable (as well as a very post-modern and deliberate misreading of The Bible’s intention), they are identifying the strength of science: it is constantly evolving and improving. To claim that this is a weakness only suggests that they haven’t imbibed the truth in St Paul’s claim that “the wisdom of God is the folly of Man.”

Using the Straw Man of Christian fundamentalism, I move into the Straw Man of the scientist. The mistake of seeing science as a bunch of facts lead to the suggestion that science, in itself, can become a religion. And while I respect the right of anyone to live their life according to the tenets of natural selection and quantum theory, it’s not science.

If science is the application of the experimental method, religion is more difficult to define. For working purposes, I call it an interrelated collection of beliefs and behaviours that seek to explain the relationship between consciousness and the universe.

(I’ve used consciousness to avoid the gendered language of “humanity” and include the possibility of consciousness on other planets, yet undiscovered.)

It’s almost incidental, but religions tend to rely on scripture.

As soon as “scientists” goes to war with Christianity – or Islam, or Judaism – it seems to slip into being  religious. It might not have had the same violent impact on human society as its competition – aside from the eugenics movement – and the label “religion” is not an insult. It’s just a clarification of what is at stake.

To end: an anecdote from my past. It was Harrow, the 1990s. A skeptic (sic) and a street evangelist were throwing down outside the cinema. The evangelist insisted that God had made the universe in six days. The skeptic countered that there were alternative cosmologies, which more readily explained the features of the physical realm. I listened for a while: one would quote Genesis, the other the Origin of Species. I have to admit that the skeptic was more convincing, but his blanket condemnation of religion was arrogant.

I humbly suggested that their conversation was not necessarily the only one possible. Without wanting to decay their ideas into a bland Golden Mean, I wondered whether a theory describing how the variety of species had evolved really undermined a parable about how consciousness became corrupted.

They both turned on me. They agreed that I wasn’t “a proper Christian.”

Yeah, I can live with that. 

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?

Middle Class - Er, Not Sure What That Is

The Guardian is probably my natural newspaper. It's left of centre - although I get frustrated by the left's frequent posturing on behalf of a notional "working class" - and intelligent. It takes theatre seriously and has a couple of superb critics, Lyn Gardner and Michael Billington, whom I love and wish would just retire. Its commitment to the internet extends to opening discussions about its article, bespeaking a reflexive consciousness. And it has a rather interesting article by Billington about the content of scripted drama.

Billington once wrote a magisterial study of twentieth century  UK theatre which emphasises its relationship to the British political climate. He is aware of theatre's social role and context, and his latest article begins with a worry that it has become "inescapably middle-class." There's a hint of nostalgia when he looks back on a past that produced kitchen sink drama, and its "unpatronising portrayal of working-class life."

Billington's faith in the generation of writers who produced The Kitchen (Wesker) and A Taste of Honey comes from his belief that they included lives that has been excluded from earlier scripts. The "well-made play" and the popularity of Noel Coward had frequently been preoccupied with the wealthier spectrum of society and while the revolutionary moment of the Angry Young Men was not perhaps as sudden as it has been depicted (the now unfashionable George Bernard Shaw had been doing "issues" on stage since the 1890s), it certainly marked a new energy in theatre. 

There is also a very rich tradition of political theatre in Britain: Billington's book traces it. Even the wild authors of the neo-brutalist school (Kane et al) acknowledged the influence of the times on their scripts, which were often more violent versions of the European absurdist school. 

But surveying the current scene - quoting the Royal Court's Dominic Cooke - Billington concludes that theatre has lost "contact with those who exist below a certain income." Truth is, theatre never had contact with those below a certain income: unless it's Mischief La Bas and their policy of giving performances that are free at the point of performance, it costs cash to get a seat. Truth is, my income would not allow me to see most of the plays I review. 

There is an uneasy association in Billington's definition of "working class" between a cultural proletarianism and poverty, and he assumes that plays about the working class are a connection to the working class. One of the first comments beneath the article sets him straight.

MattB75
I'm always sceptical about how much the supposed explosion of kitchen sink drama in the 50s really was 'working class theatre' and how much it was poverty-porn...
I wonder if fringe theatre did, and continues, to do more to bring theatre to a different audience (regardless of the material) than putting on a play about poor people at a poncy theatre.

This is followed by a few cheeky slaps at the middle-class nature of critics and demands that Billington ought to spread his net further afield, while fellow Guardian contributor Andrew Hayden points out that his article on a similar topic quotes John McGrath (often seen as one of Scotland's most important political theatre-makers) on the failure of the 1950s generation to do much more than find a way to package working class drama for a bourgeois audience. 

Elsewhere on The Guardian site, Lyn Gardner discussed the rise of the political play: while it is not inevitable that plays about the working class are political (Mrs Brown's Boys?), it seems that there is plenty of material Billington could be enjoying. And while he complains that too many contemporary plays are about the financially comfortable, Shakespeare had a habit of filling his scripts with kings and princes - did these "exclude" the working classes?

In Scotland, there is one theatre that has always supported working class theatre: The Pavilion. It has a reputation for a pantomime in bad taste, shoddy production values and an obsession with incidents from Glasgow's recent history. It's also the place where Mrs Brown visited in Glasgow, before the bizarrely unfunny TV series was commissioned. There's plenty of working class theatre there, but it is largely ignored by the critics. This irony is summed up in the final comment on Billington's article.

Rodladder
I was recently accused of being patronising by saying that one of the aims of Red Ladder's work is to entice working class audiences back into the theatre by making work which - to quote John McGrath - is a 'good night out'. 

Last saturday night was the finale of our run of shows about a 60's kitchen sink family of strikers called Sex and Docks and Rock n Roll written by Boff Whalley... Several reviewers complained that the piece (described as an anarchist pantomime) wasn't "deep enough." To the 350 raucous people who sang along and shouted and heckled at us on Saturday night the evening was a good laugh with politics thrown in and an opportunity for me to tell a joke about ATOS deeming Mrs Thatcher fit for work.

Apart from making me reluctant to make grand pronouncements about "the nature of theatre," Billington's article is provocative, questioning the role of theatre in the twenty-first century in the context of a commitment to inclusion. While he admits that "middle class dilemmas" are always a fit subject for drama (although they are quite often quite boring to someone who hasn't eaten properly for two days), he seems to be longing for a return to a time when theatre had something to say about the conditions of the less advantaged. 

However, his suggestion that the current content of scripts - which could be expanded to include the way that more experimental performance frames their format - is responsible for the exclusion of a certain class fails to acknowledge that the real barrier to entry is probably financial.  

twishbuilder


28 January 2013 10:55pmLink to this commentRecommend
4


I wonder, Michael, if it's worth looking at the class background of our front line critics, as well as recent theatre output? Just that it's not the most diverse group of people, is it? Maybe having the critical establishment be quite so homogenous actively encourages theatre away from depicting the lives of the less well off?
Report
Share this comment on Twitter
Share this comment on Facebook


b





Guardian contributor
AndrewHaydon


29 January 2013 12:01pmLink to this commentRecommend
2


I've written a piece about much the same thing, quoting John McGrath on the Royal Court of the 50s and 60s:


"Its greatest claim to social significance is that it produced a new ‘working-class’ art, that it somehow stormed the Winter Palace of bourgeois culture and threw out the old regime and turned the place into a temple of workers’ art. Of course it did nothing of the kind. What Osborne and his clever director Tony Richardson achieved was a method of translating some areas of non-middle-class life in Britain into a form of entertainment that could be sold to the middle classes."



Riverman


29 January 2013 4:15pmLink to this commentRecommend
0


@AndrewHayden - many thanks for the link to your excellent blogpost. I was about to write a response to Michael's article, but you've framed the terms of the debate far more clearly than I would have and altered the way I was going to express myself.

I can fairly be accused of verging on (!) the solipsistic when posting on here sometimes, but in this case it's inevitable, as I knew John McGrath back in the early '80s when I wrote a play for 7:84. He was an inspirational artist who taught me a lot and helped me make sense of my own rather chaotic political views. The play I wrote was, rightly, never performed - it wasn't much good. But I also found I had problems with some elements of his artistic philosophy - perhaps because I come from the Southern working class, and had been exposed to bourgeois culture, through school, at an earlier age than most people were, I didn't find that culture intimidating so much as a challenge, and it certainly never occurred to me to reject it altogether. There was a long-running debate in the New Statesman at this time about whether radical theatre would best succeed by infiltrating and gradually overturning bourgeois hegemony (god, the lingo still sticks like stale cigarette smoke!) or whether the creation of a wholly new type of theatre should be fought for. Although the debate ended in a draw, the arts council ultimately won on penalties, of course, and notions of a truly radical new theatre were expunged.

It's interesting that you quote Mike Bradwell in your piece, too, since I was also working with Mike at that time, and have continued to do so. Although the original Hull Truck Theatre Co's work was miles away from 7:84's, both companies had the phrase "a good night out" hard-wired into their thinking, and that's what made them popular and accessible to a non-bourgeois audience. I've tried to stick to that principle ever since - no matter how bleak or upsetting the events in my plays, I try my best never to let the audience go home feeling they've been lectured or harangued, or to feel that their intelligence has been belittled or insulted. And this is a problem that our theatre's been struggling with for years now: I accepted early on that a 'working class' theatre was never going to come into existence in the way McGrath and others envisioned it - as other posters have pointed out, there's too much competition from films/tv etc and then there's the sheer careerist middle-classness of our arts establishment to contend with. And as Bradwell's pointed out, the carpet-bagging admin types have colonised the arts, and theatre in particular since it was marketised, and created a managerial top-heavy beast that's very careful about who it will and won't let in (the usual disclaimer about honourable exceptions being made). So if, like some of us, you believe that British history consists to a large degree of class war, fought to varying levels of ferocity, depending on the times, then you're forced to concede that for now at least, we lost. And, interestingly considering how passionate I am about education, I think the explosion of playwriting and theatre studies courses has played a part in this. We're now producing hundreds of people every year who see the logical outcome of their degree to be a career in the theatre, or writing for tv, or both, and we see a whole new layer of bureacratic intervention to facilitate this. And the standardisation and group-think inherent in this situation, with its carefully chosen canon and set of rules, has become just another stifling brake on the radicalism and spontaneity which are vital to any art form, not to mention the debate of bigger questions such as this one. How many playwrights under the age of forty or so currently performed in our theatres haven't taught, or been taught, or both, playwriting? Is that because they're better than those who haven't done a course? Or because the gatekeepers adhere to the rules of academic theatre just as firmly as the administrators adhere to the iron rules of the market? When you hear these people describe their creative output as 'the product' you must surely know something's wrong.

One other element of the debate is the obvious one that what is 'working class' today is a dystopian mile away from what working class was in the post-war years until the '90s. In a sense, McGrath's point about the National, Court etc presenting working people's lives for the entertainment of the bourgeoisie is truer today than when he first pointed it out. But today's atomised, fragmented section of society previously known as working class deserves its own genuine voices speaking the truth about their lives, not some sentimental, faux-liberal depiction of a whole class of victims. As Trevor Griffiths wrote in his contribution to the Guardian's obituary: "John McGrath was the luck we had, all of us, whether we know it or not. And while his life may be over, I get the feeling his work is just beginning".
Report
Share this comment on Twitter
Share this comment on Facebook

Puppetry is Dead...

Although I have had plenty of art-crushes in my life, I have had far fewer philosophy crushes. Generally, old  philosophers, like Plato or Nietzsche, have managed to express ideas that inspired me alongside the sort of gender politics that would make Jim Davidson blush. Fortunately, I haven't managed to delve into the biography of John Bell too far, and I think he is my current "philosophy of puppetry" crush.

Apart from having an obvious love of puppetry that comes through even in his most academic texts, Bell is unafraid of offering  big answers. Death and Performing Objects, which is where I first fell for his mind, looks at the history of puppetry and concludes that it is fundamentally a spiritual process. Once a member of Bread and Puppet Theatre, and currently holding a post named after a Jesuit, Bell chases after the essence of puppetry, concluding that it has been used within ritual thanks to the specific qualities of the materials used in its creation.

Death and Performing Objects has the bold energy of popular criticism rather than the precise detail of the academic essay: kicking off by establishing the dualism between the living and the inert (and noticing how life itself comes from non-living matter), he sees inspiration for the arts coming from performers' willingness to look towards death. 

Citing both Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 On the Marionette Theater and Edward Gordon Craig's 1906 The Actor and the Ubermarionnete, Bell separates object manipulation from both scripted and physical theatre by emphasising how the object can replace the human presence (he quotes Craig's sardonic "the body of man is by nature utterly useless as a material for an art"). He then promotes an alternative: the 'elevated prop' can work together with the actor to offer a more comprehensive representation of reality, one where the profound question of live against death is implicit in the very fabric of the performance.


Like McLuhan's declaration that the medium is the message, object manipulation draws attention to the function of art by its format. Vox Motus' Slick has human heads atop puppet bodies, mirroring the slapstick humour of the script in the actor's (suddenly diminished) presence. Paper Cut surrounds Yael Rasooly with fragments of the magazines that maintain her character's rich fantasy life. And Cloud Eye Control explore the contemporary interface between human and technology on a stage set by projections and software. 


Bell insists that there is a difference between actors' theatre which "can talk about death and show death with living bodies pretending to be dead" and object theatre: "When puppeteers, maskers, object performers, political demonstrators, machine operators, web site designers, film directors, multi-media producers, and advertising agencies work, they constantly create and modify relationships between living human beings and dead matter: wood, stone, metal, plastic, leather, bone. This makes for a profound reckoning with death on a constant subconscious or symbolic level."

The drama of Bell's essay is that he presents an essentialist vision of object theatre, before linking the idea back to its history. He's good on the global history too - Mongolian rituals bash heads with more contemporary experiments, and there is a generosity in his inclusive analysis. That uncanny moment of recognition, the magic of the puppet, is given a grounding in its very material. And even better, he offers a possible appreciation of the purpose of art that can be seen as consistent across time and place.



  

Comics and Film and Celebrity.

Perhaps the biggest event in the Marvel Universe over the past decade (and they have been churning out major events most summers) was precipitated by a superhero team's preoccupation not with saving lives but appearing cool on a reality show. Big Man Japan stars a superhero who sports advertising on his chest and is bullied by his agent for not getting high enough ratings for a battle. After the horrors of the 1990s, when "realism" became a by-word for "nasty," perhaps the superhero is pondering the best way to mesh with society's obsession with celebrity.

Wonder Women (being shown at the GFF) follows the history of the superheroine through comics, film and television: the documentary's preoccupation with the mainstream representation of action women does ensure that most fantasy fiction is excluded. Although most strongly identified with the comic book, super-powered characters have niches in all sorts of fiction - but remained a marginal interest.

Until the advent of spiffy FX, flying, shooting beams of energy out of your eyes or summoning thunder was not the best qualification for being a movie star. Too difficult to fake realistically on film, the amazing growing, shrinking, burning and stabbing superhero was kept on the page. Suddenly, however, the movie mogul have become less frightened by the superhero, and are making films that turn already iconic figures (Spider-Man, Captain America, The Green Lantern) into cinematic legends.

Kapow!@GFF is curated by Mark Millar, who did some great Authority comics (that's the one with the gay (thinly-disguised) versions of Superman and Batman and applied superhero logic to real political issues) and some controversial Marvel series, and John McShane, whom I once met on a train and seems to be a one-man hub of creative resources (he can sometimes be found in Plan B comics). Their selection is a nice mash up of the popular (three of those Marvel Avengers films, including Thor, which ought to appeal to fans of faux Shakespearian dialogue), Alex Salmond introducing his favourite geek film (still a secret, but let's hope it is something embarrassing), serious documentaries (Wonder Women! and Cartoon College) and a film in which Kevin Smith presents himself, in the closing credits, as the creepiest man in film (seriously, dude, watch those comments about fifteen year old vampire chicks).

One of the core arguments about comics in Comic-Con IV: A Fan's Hope is that the geek have inherited the earth (Smith's ill judged monologue tries to suggest that getting laid is a sign of how cool something has become. Sigh). While I still think Millar and McShane could have set their sights higher - wasn't "Call Me" Dave Cameron free? - getting the First Minister to not just admit he is a geek but to come along and present the film shows that even top politicians are bowing to the power of the marginalised.

This acceptance by the mainstream isn't however, matched by a corresponding respectability - it's still not cool to read the X-Men on the Subway. The coverage around Judge Dredd's apparent homosexuality has reinforced notions that a comic addressing a real life issue is a novelty - and that the fandom is conservative. The advent of the successful superhero movie is not an expression of acceptance of heroes on their own terms, but the result of its fusion with celebrity culture. Throughout Comic-Con IV, it is the arrival of celebrities - Kevin Smith or the guy who plays Captain America that really gets the crowd going.





Nope, lost my point. Sorry.

No Answers, Many Doubts

I wish that the world was simple.


For example, I am a fan of Mary Beard - at least as a classicist and probably as a political thinker. I imagine that the things she said on Question Time probably accord with my own gentle liberalism. And I agree with her that the abuse directed towards her was misogynistic and was part of an online attitude that dispenses with common courtesy.

But it turns out that the website that hosted the abuse has been shut down. The owner gave a bit of an apology to Beard, and the closure is being blamed on an increased interest after a Jimmy Savile story. While I don't like the spirit of trolling that inhabits large parts of the internet (after I saw Do Not Feed The Trolls at Macrobert, the line between online and off-line bullying was clearer), I worry that any attempt to control it is a step towards censorship.

I can't say I am glad that the site has been closed. The next time I fancying reading abuse aimed at right-wing celebrity comedians, I am going to have to do a new search.

Before I go on, I want to re-iterate that I do not support the abuse of Mary Beard. I am especially offended by its naked misogyny, the threats of sexual violence and the deeply personal nature of the trolling.

However, Mary Beard got to put her opinion across on The Guardian website. The BBC has shown its support for her (quite rightly: she makes good TV). Most newspapers carried a column deploring the behaviour of those on the now defunct site - and Twitter. She had a very strong platform to retaliate from. While the tone of the abuse was, as she said, "playground bullying," it ended up being more like pupils mocking a teacher, who then holds a special assembly to condemn them.

Freedom of Speech is a pain. Defending it becomes an issue of allowing people to say things I find offensive. There's probably a sense in which some of those statements about Beard - especially the ones on Twitter, which could have been sent directly to her - come under hate-speech or even constitute a threat. Her willingness to speak out against it, and highlight a virulent strand of misogyny, is admirable.

But, assuming the site did shut because of the controversy, this is not a victory for freedom of speech.

In fact, the ability of the Internet to give these characters a platform has demonstrated how freedom of speech is "a good thing." Beard's intelligent, measured responses have brought to light the way that misogynist hate-speech still has a currency. It had created a debate around the representation of women on television. The opinions didn't come into being because of the Internet. It just allowed them to be put into the public domain. From there, they have been addressed.

One website closing makes little difference, and maybe it's just economics. Not being a huge fan of the free market (in this case, if Donald Trump had the "I Hate Female Classicists" site, it's unlikely the financial burden would cause him to shut down), I don't like the idea that a website can disappear just because the creator can't afford the bandwidth. And maybe it's good that social pressure can remove unpleasant comments from public space.

At least my name isn't Peter

I have been distracted from my live blogging at the Stills' gallery by an article about the treatment of TV classicist Mary Beard. AA Gill spent most of his review of her programme, Meet The Romans, banging on about her appearance. This has been followed by what she describes in a Guardian article as "vile playground bullying."

As it happens, back when I was a student of Classics, I was very enthusiastic about Beard's essays. She had a lively, intelligent, even iconoclastic approach. In the world of Classics, at least back in the day, getting to read arguments that weren't staid was a rare treat. I am pleased that one of my favourite academics has got her own show on the shit-pump, and that Question Time is recognising how a classicist can bring a little bit of perspective to political discussion. Given that the other person who bangs on about politics and classics is Boris Johnson, she is a relief.

Of course, I have had to make a facile comment on her use of the word "vile" though. Being a bit sensitive (I know exactly what "vile playground bullying" means through lived experience), I catalogue the uses of my surname in the media. Generally, as in Beard's use, it refers to sexual abuse. The particular insults that Beard has received on Twitter do have that nasty sexual aggressiveness, even beyond their emphasis on her gender. I won't even repeat them here, in case my mother breaks a habit of a lifetime and reads my blog.

The tabloid media reserve "vile" for sex offenders. Google "vile paedophile" and see. Even The Morning Star uses it. And that guy who wore a shell-suit for twenty years before being buried in a gold coffin hasn't helped.

I can try and point to the heritage of the surname, but that doesn't help. The word does mean morally reprehensible. I could try a maneuver that explores the etymology: coming from old French, meaning common, it is a slur aimed at the working classes. But I just don't like to hear it because it is my name and my memories of getting chased round the playing fields come back every time it ends up in a tabloid headline.

However, I am going to give this a go: the abuse directed at Beard is misogynistic and, as she says, bullying. That old fashioned word - sexist - would be direct enough and more precise. A more exact use of language would be gratefully received by me and help clarify what is at stake in the defense of Beard.

She is being given a hard time because she didn't brush her hair. A quick check of Boris Johnson, the other TV classicist, reveals that yes, men do get away with it. People insult Boris, but usually on the grounds that he has said something offensive. Using a vague term like "vile" is all about the impact, not the meaning.

Of course, it's a reminder why I don't watch television: it's all about the surface. The episode of Question Time that led to her abuse featured a conversation about immigration. The issues involved in that have been thrown to the side while commentators challenge themselves to imagine nastier slurs on her appearance.


Funnily enough, when I was at school, I tried to invent a nickname for myself, just like Dave Lee Travis would. It was "horrenti capillo." Thanks to a double crown, my hair would always stick up. I came across this phrase in a story about a ghost.

I got some serious vile bullying after that.

Internet Musings

The precise correlation between the invention of the printing press and the internet is a subject of considerable debate: a quick Google search turns up so many business leaders claiming the comparison suggests that it is already a cliche. The exact nature of the net's impact and reach is still open to debate, but one theme is its relationship to printed media.

The apparent collapse of the traditional readership for newspapers has been linked to the rise of the blogger - speaking as someone who scooped The Herald on a rather trivial item this week, I'd like to imagine myself being part of the offensive. But that is just vanity. Questions of authority and inclusion are rarely answered with any finality: luckily, the serial nature of both newsprint and blogging means the dialogue can continue indefinitely.

What is perhaps more interesting is the way that the internet might change not the reading habits but the way of understanding information. Newspapers may or may not disappear - despite spending all day on a computer, I buy that tabloid version of The Independent (and love its constant tone of self-congratulation) and a big Sunday Paper (if they are giving away a free CD or have an interview with Chris Rea). But already, they are evolving in response.

The real impact of the printing press - which will be the test to compare the impact of the web - was on society, not reading habits. The worries that always appear in the face of new media (the ancients worried that the written word would destroy memory) tend to emphasise the threat to existing skills. But  after the printing press, the protestant reformation happened, and this has been ascribed to the availability of The Bible.

The dominant power of the medieval era in Europe- the Catholic Church - was undermined and replaced by a new power. The value systems of Christendom were at first adjusted, then deconstructed. The rise of reason, of scientific method, could be intimately tied to the potential of the printed word.

The authority once handed to the church and its representatives was transferred to the written word. When competing texts appeared, a new location of authority needed to be found - and philosophical investigation was a good fit. Scientific method is even better.

That's probably enough of the obvious stuff: medium is the message, Darwin's theories would not have become known so widely if they had been passed by word of mouth, science is not a series of ideas but is best expressed as an experimental approach, books encourage a sort of meditation on a theme, reading is good for the character.

Here's a few internet specials too: it encourages sound-bite culture (nope, TV did that in the 1970s), it's all porn and clips from bad TV (I found a few videos of the Swans' latest tour, suggesting a discerning presence somewhere), it lacks authority...

Having set up the question - how will the internet change our values and society, I quickly add that not only do I not know, I distrust anyone who claims that they do. We are in the middle of the change, and if the business world thinks that we are going to take its opinions seriously, they might want to ponder the dot.com bubble bursting. So excited by the potential for making cash, they forgot even basic business principles, making my "vision statement" sessions look rigorous by comparison.

Brilliant. I started with such high hopes for this article. Suddenly, I am stuck, left with only the idea that I have no idea what to say. And whatever I have to say ought to have been said in the first paragraph, before the reader got bored.

However, the media studies of Marshall McLuhan are always helpful. Between noting that any technology disables as well as enables (yes, the car is faster than the bus, but the bus allows interaction with other people and is better for the environment), he talks about the medium as the message. By misreading this, I arrive at the idea that the internet will not simply serve to distribute the same sort of information as a newspaper, or a book, but that its technology will encourage a sort sort of expression and information.

For example, there is no way that a newspaper would print this article. It's vague, it lacks substance and I keep changing from serious, faux-objective tone to personal expressions of doubt.

(The medium is the message. The way I am saying this is what I am really saying).

Since I run by blog, and I am trying to up the number of posts, I'll put it up. My idea is not fully formed, but it is possible to follow the links I have inserted, and for the reader, realising through my use of style that I am not trying to make a definitive statement, could have their own tentative response.

Thoughts on Dead Matter

John Bell, in Death and Performing Objects, suggests that "What makes performance with puppets.. and other objects different than the actor's work is a concentration, both in the creation and execution... on the materials of the inanimate world, the dead world of inert matter." Considering a range of performances, from a 1511 Florentine Carnival through to the plays of Polish icon Kantor, Bell argues that this consideration makes object manipulation a fundamentally spiritual practice.

The fashion for art that considers the afterlife has been the victim of the twenty-first century's movement towards the secular - the journey of Derren Brown, from youthful Christian to a determined materialist reflects something of the cultural shift away from religion towards science as the dominant influence on society. 

For all the justified complaints of atheists that religion still holds an undue respect, the combination of technological advances and popular science writing has encouraged artists to ponder scientific theory over theological intention. For example, after the war, choreographer Robert Helpmann updated the Christ story to a Glasgow of tenement and slum when he wanted to extend the range of ballet's contents. In contrast, Wayne MacGregor, when not making idiosyncratic videos for Radiohead, is inspired by his research fellowship in neuroscience. And Janis Claxton's study of primates has translated into a series of choreographies that take cues from the great ape's social organisation and behaviour.

Bell's argument follows a selective history of puppetry to identify a specific concern with the relationship between the human and the inanimate. Noting that many traditions feature puppets literally made from the dead, like the Indian tolubommalata that even specifies that the puppets must be made from the hide of an animal which died a natural death and was not killed for purpose, he evokes the words of Kleist and Edward Craig who appeared to want to replace the actor with the puppet. Connecting this to certain rituals - notably the Aztec priest wearing a suit of flayed skin - he presents a case for the puppet as a representation of death.

Although Bell conflates very diverse artists into a single narrative, his claims about the puppet as a reminder of the relationship between inanimate and living material is persuasive, and perhaps accounts for the uncanny impact of works like Schicklgruber, where Nigel Tranter operates life-size versions of Hitler and friends. As puppetry becomes less concerned with "hiding the strings" and the puppeteer is clearly visible,  the relationship between puppeteer and puppet echoes the broader relationship between man and matter.

Throughout Bell's essay, there is an unwillingness to address the spiritual concerns that the rituals considered - the Florentine Carnival was undoubtedly Christian - even if it has a few pagan elements, and the Aztec priest was not playing dress up in flesh for an exclusively secular end and the spirituality he considers is oddly materialist (the puppet becomes a reminder of mortality and the way of all flesh): Klein was interested in the marionette as a cypher for the human in tune with divine grace, even ironically, and Kantor wasn't shy about referencing either the seance or the mass. While he doesn't convince that a preoccupation with death is implicitly spiritual, he effectively offers a resonance to the puppet's presence.

Perhaps this resonance is what encouraged Egyptian priests or medieval churches to incorporate automata into their liturgies - certainly, it's an aspect of the puppet's aura and adds fire to Tranter's depiction of Hitler. His conclusion, which points to modern political demonstrations as part of this tradition, integrates both the otherworldly atmosphere of the puppet show with the contemporary enthusiasm for theatre as a potent, radical activism.