Mad Cyril Tells It like He Sees It (Diderot and the Lap-dancer, interlude 3)

I have a bit of bother with this whole ‘suspension of disbelief’ malarkey.  I know Coleridge came up with it, and he wasn’t adverse to a bit of puff. Suggests his relationship to reality was probably tangential. But I’ve seen a few plays, like that Forced Entertainment one when I was right off my chump, and I didn’t feel the need to scream that there was a real gorilla on the stage. It was that sexy bird in a monkey suit. I knew that.

Mind you, I still reckon that Bloody Mess was the closest I’ve ever come to feeling the dramatic illusion old Diderot bangs on about. The way that they had these characters

doing their own thing, ignoring each other pretty much, just trying to tell their own story – and the way that this overlapped so that each personal story reflected on the others – this series of unconnected episodes that somehow connected to each other. 

Yeah, that’s the closest I’ve seen to real life on stage. Plus no-one knew whether they were a tragedy or a comedy: couple of clowns trying to split up, only they couldn’t; a sexy lady talking dirty in that gorilla clobber; two dirty long-hairs pretending they were romantic heroes.

That time Forced Entertainment was good – unlike their follow-up, which tried the same trick only explaining history and failed – that was text-book dramatic illusion. See, they kept piling it on, scene after scene. The sort who wanted to pass away, the geezer doing his impersonations of various bombs, the clown trying to tell a story about the universe… the end of the Universe, as it happens, which suggests that they might have had a bit of a destructive theme going on. 

The emotions got higher and higher, until the whole thing was a bloody mess. Just what it says on the tin – and there was no way reason was able to cope with the amount of information they were chucking at the audience. The constant interruptions, the bickering, bloke getting his nads out at one point… it was so much that reason was proper overwhelmed. And so, yeah, I might never have forgotten that it was a play – they were quick to chat straight at the audience – but I was right in and about it.

Diderot was never much cop at fiction: his novel gets distracted by big ideas and

wanders off to explore them. One thing, which Lessing sampled in his Hamburger Cook-Book, was this thing, where a bloke is told about this intrigue – which is really a play – then gets taken to the theatre to see it. The punch-line is, even though the bloke’s been told the intrigue is all real, as soon as he sees the play, in a theatre (natch), he’s like: oh right, it’s a play.

Now I mention this because Diderot is explaining why plays can never have suspension of disbelief. In his time, they had the knobs sitting on the stage and all, so you got these gawkers right up in the action. Diderot did mention that he wanted the impediments to realism out of the way, but this problem – of explaining the dramatic illusion through reason (it’s supposed to be a thing of emotional overload, so quite why he thinks he’ll manage that is another point) – is made a lot more difficult when the play as a play is being made clear by all the stage business and the way that the actors speak their words.

Suspension of disbelief? Skin us up another one, Coleridge, eh?

Five Performances for a Post-Referendum Scotland

Audience (Ontroerend Goed)
Many critics got upset because the company abused a plant in the crowd, missing the subsequent deconstruction of 'the manufacture of consent' and dismissing the Belgians as shock-tactic nihilists. The last half hour, however, demonstrates how easy mass manipulation can be, and the problems that 'doing the right thing' can bring to anyone who mistakes observation as passivity.

Bloody Mess (Forced Entertainment)
The show that will keep Forced Entertainment on the syllabus of University Theatre Studies until the subject is finally rolled up into the Faculty of Neo-Darwinian Analysis, Bloody Mess  is a glorious fusion of many themes and competing ideas. One especially powerful strand is the gradual revelation that apparent communication is, in fact, just the juxtaposition of individuals following their own journey and accidently bumping into each other. Plenty is said, but no dialogue ever emerges. 

Fall (Zinnie Harris)
Apparently, in the navy, when the tempest rages and men are swept

overboard or eaten by a giant squid, a wily old jack tar will mumble: 'never mind, worse things happen in a Zinnie Harris play.' Miserable dystopias are cheap in theatre, ever since Beckett got chuckles from Godot: it is Harris' attention to detail and broad poetic scope that lift her apocalypses above the mundane. Dominic Hill's direction often found the beauty in the brutality, and Fall's finale renders the end of the world... delicate.

Jesus, Queen of Heaven (Jo Clifford)
Remember how I bang on about the hermeneutical spiral? This is a good reminder of how the event (in this case, the claims for the incarnation of the Judeo-Christian God) is given meaning by the process of rereading and recontextualisation. Note: does not contain fundamentalism.

VSPRS (Les Ballets C de la B)
This rarely needs a reason to be included, but... like Bloody Mess, it has strands to spare and the way that the awkward, the physically unique and the other are capable of moving towards an ecstatic moment of unity probably make it the one of the most vivid and visceral expression of the holiness of all human life (at least in the tradition of European contemporary dance). Plus it had Iona Kewney in it, and a gypsy band playing psychedelic versions of Monteverdi.

Autobiographical Fictional Critique