Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
What does it mean to come from Falkirk? In fact what does it mean to come from anywhere? Find out at What the F**kirk? a new one man comedy play written and performed by Falkirk born writer and playwright Alan Bissett, which is touring the Falkirk area from Wednesday 3rd to Sunday 14th June 2015.
What the F**kirk? asks the all important question: What is Fawkurt aw aboot? Is it just the town that invented Irn Bru and Tartan? Or is it unique, with its own history, dialect, landscape, architecture and culture, all of which adds up to a distinct accent of the mind?
This hilarious new play takes audiences through the past and the present right up to the arrival of the Kelpies and its new title of 'a creative place to be.’ Directed by Sacha Kyle with live music from local musician Adam Stafford, it will tour to small community venues throughout the area including Bonnybridge Community Hall, Grangemouth Town Hall and Hallglen Sports Centre.
What the F**kirk? was commissioned by Falkirk Community Trust to celebrate Falkirk’s success at the Creative Place Awards in 2014. It is part of ‘The Falkirk Story’, one of three projects created to showcase and nurture the wealth of creative talent living and working in the Falkirk area.
Alan Bissett said: “This is going to be a really lively, fun evening out which takes a look at the past and present of Falkirk, one which hopefully make the audience laugh but also make them think. What the F**kirk? is about a community and a people. I want folks to feel pride in the place that they come from, recognise its value but also reflect upon what we've lost over the years. It's really a forensic examination of what a place like Falkirk means, but in stand-up comedy format. It's pretty much the most Falkirk thing you'll ever see in your life."
Lesley O’Hare, Culture and Libraries Manager said: “ We are delighted that Alan has come back to Falkirk to help us deliver this Creative Place project. Alan is a real inspiration for the new generation of writers which he has been working with. He is also an extremely talented performer and I am very much looking forward to seeing What the F**kirk? and his take on how Falkirk has changed.”
What the F**kirk? will tour the Falkirk area in the first two weeks of June.
Wed 3 June, Slamannan Community Centre, 7.30pm Fri 5 June, The Dobbie Hall, Larbert, 7.30pm Sat 6 June, Grangemouth Town Hall, 7.30pm Sun 7 June, The Barony Theatre, Bo’ness, 7.30pm Mon 8 June, The Craiglee Inn, Reddingmuirhead, 7.30pm Tues 9 June, Bonnybridge Community Hall, 7.30pm Fri 12 June, Behind the Wall, Falkirk, 7.30pm Sat 13 June, The Songbird, Denny, 7.30pm Sun 14 June, Hallglen Sports Centre, 7.30pm
To be sure, the feminist movement is a pluralistic entity, full of competing strands that share only a concern with the status of women and a sense that things aren't quite right. There's the Dworkin/MacKinnon school, which identifies pornography with sexual assault; there's the followers of Camille Paglia with their sex-positive emphasis; Third Wave Feminists; post-feminists, body essentialists, lesbian separatists... In all of this, only the male feminists have a single, simple role. They need to shut the fuck up and listen. By this standard, Ban This Filth is an abject failure. Not only does it provide an example of a male artist parading his wounds at the hands of patriarchy, it picks out one writer (Dworkin) and makes her the epitome of feminist wisdom. Never mind that her work is problematic - for all her talk of male violence, her work is full of brutal imagery and aggression, or that her anti-pornography laws led to an urban myth that her own writings were banned by them - Dworkin is only a single voice, and is a divisive figure. Her final years were marred by a controversy that is tragic and depressing: when Bissett calls her an Old Testament-style prophet, he could add that these prophets were, generally, unpopular during their lives. Her later exile may be seen as part of a failure on the part of society to accommodate her opinions. Although the episodes from Bissett's life are familiar and funny, they work to marginalise the voices he supposedly supports. He makes a point of how women have supported him in his career, before writing and performing a one-man show that is all about him. Sure, he challenges himself, noting that his passion for Dworkin can be seen as a simplistic response to liberal guilt. Sure, he admits that he is climbing on the backs of women, but he makes that fundamental liberal mistake. Expressing an opinion is not the same thing as working on strategies towards liberation.
Bissett can bang on about how bad he feels for looking at naughty videos - he can even offer to strip off on stage (thereby experiencing vulnerability). He can champion Dworkin, an extreme voice who lived an oppression far worse than getting shouted at for dancing funny in a Falkirk nightclub. He can ignore the serious critique of Dworkin by Nussbaum, allowing her a philosophical free pass (and making her sound like a radical feminist beat poet when he reads from her writings).
None of these things actually change the systematic oppression of women, or do anything about the pornographic industry. (Note: this does not reflect my complete opinions on Ban This Filth).
And so it continues: The Daily Telegraph has a pop at Alan Bissett, on the grounds that he needs to lose some weight. This one hit home for me - I am heavier than Bissett and have more of a paunch. Personal insults are taking it way too far, and I actually thought that bit where he stripped down to his shreddies revealed a fairly good body.
Not that I appreciated it in any way other than a neutral, calm manner.
Of course, press attacks on artists that get personal are obnoxious and need to be called out. More than that, it seems that these journalists are encroaching on my territory, art criticism. I have always made it clear that I am not a journalist (no shorthand for starters), and their articles are making it pretty bloody clear that they are not critics.
You see, to be a critic, you need to have some basic understanding of the function of art. Art isn't a series of instructions to be blindly followed by the audience. It is a creative expression of a subjective viewpoint, presenting ideas for discussion. Regardless of the way it is presented, the apparent sincerity of the artist or the opinions expressed, an intelligent audience is free to interpret.
By intelligent, in this case, I mean able to see or hear or feel or touch.
Let's switch attention to another right-wing newspaper and see how The Daily Mail addressed the suicide of a young man.
A sixth-former who became introverted and withdrawn when he met his first girlfriend was found hanged after spending three hours searching for death metal songs on YouTube, an inquest heard.
Oliver King, 16, viewed songs including The Body of Death of the Man With The Body of Death by Pinkly Smooth before taking his own life while his mother was out of the house.
He left no suicide note and had never received any medical help for depression or mental illness.
But he texted a friend weeks before his death saying 'I imagine killing myself every day' and police found deleted images on his iPod which included the words: 'I'm sorry I want to give up. I’m sorry I want to die. I’m sorry I want to kill myself.'
The inquest heard Oliver, from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, turned from an outgoing schoolboy into an introvert and began wearing dark clothes, long hair and makeup after beginning his first serious relationship.
He began listening to metal bands he had not listened to before, including Avenged Sevenfold and Black Veil Brides, and relations with his parents became strained.
The teenager began spending little time at home, lost weight and fell behind with his A-level studies. He had coursework deadlines the day after he died in February last year.
After the inquest his father Adrian King, 43, a management and IT consultant, said: 'I think the music did contribute to his state of mind. He was hanging out with the wrong crowd and I believe this lifestyle was more to blame than anything else.'
The surprise expressed that a teenager might have trouble relating to his parents, the salient fact that academic pressures are barely acknowledged compared to the space given to his 'death metal' enthusiasm, and the emphasis placed on the music as a catalyst suggest that there isn't a deep understanding of... well, life behind this article.
Just as a comparison, here's a description of some people listening to Wagner.
Thus again there arose a silence, full of expectation... out of evenly trembling waves of sound, in gradual, cruelly voluptuous crescendi, continually sinking back into themselves, there developed the most violent attack on human nerves... everyone, in their own way, felt gripped, overwhelmed, tortured, delighted, dishevelled. Even Frau von Ramburg could not maintain her dignity; she began to writhe on her chair like a snake.
Ferdinand von Saar is a better writer - that is a beautiful description of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde - but it articulate the same moral panic. It suggests that music can change personality.
I'm bored now, but here's the connection. Slagging off Alan Bissett for his opinions, or blaming metal for suicides, or Wagner for an aristocratic family having an orgy, is to miss the possibility that the human mind can interpret art. It doesn't take a genius to recognise that reading anything with irony completely subverts its meaning. The particular work that took a slagging, Ban This Filth! has problems, but they are caused by Bissett's willingness to offer multiple interpretations: his physical vulnerability reflected the emotional vulnerability he was chasing in his speeches.
Oh, and Avenged Sevenfold are not death metal. I got cornered at a party once by a speed metal fan. Forty minutes later, I knew the difference between black, speed and death metal. In detail...
Oh yes - and this: the Werther effect. Expect the next sanctimonious article not to include the line '... a copy of The Daily Mail was found by his bed.'
In the nicest possible way, Alan Bissett is a pain in the arse. Ban This Filth deals with some uncomfortable topics (patriarchy, internet pornography, the guilt of the liberal mired in a culture of gross masculinity) that demand an answer. Mixing up cheeky routines that could stand alone as cabaret turns (a night on the lash with the boys becomes both a satire of lad culture and a sharp exposure of male insecurity), extracts from Andrea Dworkin's writings on pornography and episodes from the life of the author, Ban This Filth is a necessarily tentative investigation into the contemporary relationship between culture and pornography.
Bissett frames his exploration within an autobiographical context: the first half of the show is filled with anecdotes from his life. Bissett comes across as slightly self-obsessed (this is a performance persona, of course, and does not reflect on the 'real' Alan Bissett), guiltily considering the role of women in his success, but takes time to acknowledge the pressure on men to conform: a list of 'reasons you've been called a poof' and the energetic admonitions of the P.E. teacher ('being eleven is not an excuse for failure') are familiar to any sensitive young man.
Gradually, Bissett moves towards adulthood and, inevitably, the arrival of internet pornography. Running parallel to his erotic discoveries, he reads from Dworkin's autobiographical memoirs of abuse - a parallel process of education into gender identity. But where Bissett's (male) persona is being offered the freedom to dominant, Dworkin finds sexual abuse and institutional oppression.
The second half of Ban This Filth grapples with the implications of Dworkin's anti-pornpography stance for Bissett's own compromised engagement with feminism. He recognises how inept and self-satisfied his attempts to be an active feminist can be (a plant in the audience harangues him for being patronising, and the status of Dworkin within modern thought is dismissed with a mocking laugh), and advances a few, awkward thoughts on how he can, like Michael Jackson says, 'start with the man in the mirror.' The Bissett that concludes the show is less bumptious, less arrogant than the one who begins it - by addressing pornography, he seems to have begun to address his own sense of male entitlement.
Kenneth Davidson didn't so much give me the number of the beast in response to my last blog, he gave me its post code. I am always worried when I try to get political, because I know that I have friends who are far more knowledgeable than I am.
In the meantime, I did check out the speech made by Maria Miller. Ever since Rob Drummond did a version of the Blondie number and dedicated it to the arts minister, I've been trying to get my head around the problem. I mean, she's a Tory, right? Did anyone expect her to say anything that didn't involve their catch-phrase of austerity?
The British political theatre of the 1970s,
at least in the English, scripted variations, expressed a determinedly
socialist intention and an almost anarchic cynicism about the antics of
socialist politicians. The Labour Party is pictured as hopelessly compromised,
the smaller parties as dismal cults of personality. Before the advent of punk,
which fired into the raw, inarticulate alienation of the working classes,
theatre was possibly the most dynamic public forum for the discussion of
counter-cultural ideology. While the hippies of the 1960s settled into drug
psychoses and addiction, or mellowed out over Pink Floyd’s jams, playwrights
were seething.
If there is a revival of the political urge
amongst young playwrights today, it is tempered by the spirit of the 1980s
(Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society might be more
historically prescient than her war against trade unionism, what with the
reformation of ideas like “friendship” and “privacy” thanks to the Internet)
and the 1990s, when Tony Blair deliberately courted the arts and, mainly in the
now derided Cool Brittania phase,
made them courtiers to the state. Rather than taking swipes at the figures who
engage with existing political systems, there is a focus on the lives of the
victims of the systems. At its best, contemporary political theatre is
compassionate rather than angry.
Anger is a difficult emotion to express. It is deliberately repulsive: much of the reason for the original resistance to
punk was perhaps its naked aggression. Whether The Sex Pistols were mining the
incoherent anguish of personal alienation, or The Clash were making rudimentary
attempts to join the political dots, punk married a conservative sound – the
rough edges of noise that would later flourish in the wave of 1980s bands who
regarded feedback as an instrument were more a function of musical ineptitude –
with an immediate rage. If early rock’n’roll took the joyous and nervous
blossoming of adolescent sexuality, punk grounded itself in the teenage temper
tantrum.
Rob Drummond is possibly marking himself
out as the angriest of the new generation of Scottish theatre-makers. Both Quiz Show and Riot of Spring have scenes of disgust: the quiet meditation on
child abuse that concludes the former and the karaoke tribute to Maria Miller
in the latter. They swerve into the lack of focus that is often the hallmark of
rage – the closing monologue of Quiz Show
fails to consider why celebrities can get away with paedophilia, merely
condemning it (a statement impossible to reject), and the irritation directed
at the culture minister is trivial, especially in the context of a play that
brings up the major disturbances that rocked London (before the Olympics
restored a measure of national pride).
In both cases, however, Drummond is
exploring something different from the compassion studies of his contemporaries
Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair. In Rantin,
Hurley offers a kaleidoscope of modern Scottish lives, only briefly tearing
into the tyranny of late capitalism and containing this monologue within a broader
narrative that is more interested in presenting the richness of individual’s
lives. McNair’s thrilling Donald
Robertson, meanwhile, is a close-up on how comedy can save a young man’s
social status while destroying his moral integrity.
Drummond is harking back to the 1970s of
the punks rather than the playwrights: he is doing anger as a counterblast. If
it works better within The Riot, that
is because the overall structure – episodic, sketchy and consciously aping a
DIY production – hold the moment more carefully. The speech at the end of Quiz Show, while a more precise moral
position, is disappointingly vague in a play that has a well-managed formal
shape. The difference is between the script, which allows for deeper
discussion, and the DIY devised show that taps into immediate energy.
The kind of detailed political analysis
that can make the 1970s’ authors dated has not resurfaced in the contemporary
political writers. It’s noticeable that much of the strongest political theatre
has addressed matters of national identity – Alan Bissett’s Turbo Folk or Greig’s Dunsinane.
There’s a precision in these works’
understanding of the relationship between Scotland and the UK that has not been
matched in the early responses to the London riots. Hurley, in collaboration
with AJ Taudevin, offered Chalk Farm,
a look at the experience of a rioter and their mother, an approach mirrored in Riot of Spring. In both cases, the story was
descriptive and the underlying assumptions about the reasons behind the riot
were more struts for the plot and characters than the complex deconstruction Dunsinane applies to Anglo-Scottish
relations.
In two senses, this isn’t important.
Drummond and Hurley, and Taudevin, are all emerging artists – hardly at the
first stage of their career, but not in the pomp of their glory. There’s time
for them to do the analysis, probably when they become middle-aged. And it
isn’t just the job of the artist to complete the discussion: the audience can
get involved too. Both Chalk Farm and
Riot, and Rantin et cetera provide a provocation.
Indeed, the compassion Hurley and Taudevin
display in Chalk Farm sets a tone for
the discussion, as well as giving a few details for the post-show arguments.
Even the incompleteness has a virtue: it prevents the drama from becoming a
rhetorical announcement of a definitive position. As Leonard Cohen points out,
when he wasn’t boasting about sexual conquests or being a Baldy Buddhist, it’s
the crack in everything that lets the light come in.
On The Radio Hour, top DJ and sound engineer at the coolest parties, Josh Hill correctly complained that the annual Hot Lists tend to miss out the personal - as he putting it, "more huffing of poppers outside the Old Hairdressers" and less grand statements about the state of the nation. In this spirit, I wrote a highly personal top ten. Then I realised that "five great text messages" won't end up on anyone's publicity material.
As a compromise, and a sop to my massive ego, I am going to identify the seven top trends in my thinking. This will allow me to mention as many events as I like, and still make it all about me. I challenge the artists mentioned to include my shout out to them in their next application for funding.
Trend no. 7: My Continued Inability to Integrate a Political Consciousness into my Aesthetic Critique.
Fond as I am of banging on about alienation, I still struggle to see the best way for political philosophy to appear within performance. The highly dramatic boycott of Israeli company Batsheva Dance made a passionate appeal on behalf of the Palestinian people, but managed to piss off plenty of liberal critics who found it intrusive (the show was stopped by chanting groups inside the auditorium) and hypocritical (The Russian ballet company up the road didn't get any attention, despite having a state that enjoys oppressing minorities, too).
There are arguments on both sides - mostly focussing on the exact relationship between Batsheva's tour and the amount of funding provided by the Israeli government - but life would easier if the choreographer in question wasn't both brilliant and personally ambivalent about the antics of his government.
While this was the most publicised political action in the arts - it had similar heavy duty support that would give the weight to the complaints against Creative Scotland - politics has entered the theatre in more interesting ways - Kieran Hurley and AJ Taudevin had a look at the London riots for their entry at Oran Mor's Play, Pie, Pint programme, Make Better Please saw the previously personal Uninvited Guests strain against the build up of media inspired despair, and Lyn Gardner wrote a blog about political theatre in the Guardian. Alan Bissett, wearer of a very cool leather jacket, made explicit his support for an independent Scotland and David Greig set up a dialogue about national identity in his sequel to Macbeth.
In the time that I began writing criticism, the political was on the back-foot. Perhaps it was the amount of money, or moral support, being thrown at the artists under New Labour. Perhaps it was the emphasis on personal politics - like in the version of Wuthering Heights now being prepped for The Arches' Platform 18 Awards, the study of the self and identity was seen as far more important. Unfortunately, I am about to be left behind, having embraced that path - I am still more interested in art as a mirror of the audience than as a manifesto for a better world. But if Greig, Bissett, Taudevin and Hurley are investigating it, I am willing to believe that political theatre is making a comeback and is now relevant.
Glasgow Girls at the Citizens was also the first agit-prop musical that had a dub 7" handed out at the door - its good humoured mix of local history (it covered the campaign to protect asylum seekers), multi-cultural dance numbers and poignant satire made me reconsider both the musical and the theatre as a direct forum for political opinion.
Of course, I have been told by a dear and old friend that "everything is politics," and my continued insistence on the primacy of aesthetics is, in itself, an immoral conservatism. I am hoping that Arika hurry up with their next weekend of engaged readings and gigs. Their Special Form of Darkness weekender had a mixture of serious Marxist analysis and fun nihilism, which suits my anarchist instincts.
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