I saw a play and you'll never guess what happened next...

I'll tell you what the real crime is...

Many people suspect the truth: I became a critic because there is a gnawing void in my soul - what Sartre called 'the god-shaped hole'. I am alienated beyond measure, so full of my first world problems and as religion is rejected as a viable model for the discussion of ideas, I turned to performance. I hope for a peak experience, like that time when I saw Les Ballets C de la B, during which my existential anxiety is displaced by ecstasy.

By ecstasy, I mean that moment when my aesthetic, emotional and intellectual capacities are filled to overflowing, and my soul dances like one of Blake's libidinal angels.

This brings me to the matter of Iphigenia in Splott. 

It's a dynamic example of theatre's potential to engage the emotions. Despite being set in a bit of Wales I have never visited - for Glasgow fans, it's a bit like Govan, I reckon - it draws me into a story about a young women stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. And despite never having been knocked up by a faithless soldier, I felt earnest empathy with this woman, and left outraged by this bloody society that gives me all this privilege.

The script is amazing: combining an attention to local detail and a passionate plea for compassion, it roves across urban dystopia, state oppression and emotional alienation. And the central - solo - performance is note perfect. For those of us jaded by emotion, it's a rare chance to feel something in our shriveled consumerism souls. 

Back in The Thatcher Years, there was loads of explicitly angry political theatre. Then Tony Blair came along, and integrated the arts into society - remember Cool Britannia? Sure, the artists turned on him, but the emphasis on art as socially useful and important - an instrument for pacifying the population - was established. 

That's a rant for another time, but Iphigenia doesn't pull any punches. Her tragedy is caused by the state. The cuts in the NHS, and the marginalisation of the proletariat, loiter around the drama like the ghost of a pissed up Eton Toff. And it transmits the rage, the anguish. It's a polemic, and its not ashamed.

Here's what you get. A script. One actor. A suggestive yet minimal set. Some lighting. And then - boom... it is like an object lesson in how the basics can bring home the theatrical bacon. 

Fond memories of Big Male Actors aside, Iphigenia has a solo turn that is a reminder of why 'acting' is a cool profession. Diderot said the actor performs an emotion, and the audience experiences it. I needed a very stiff drink after seeing this at the Fringe - and the character ends up with a drink problem. 

The lighting does just enough to shift atmospheres (similar to the way Blackbird at The Citz works it).

Okay, here's my problem. The rage is so clear, it feels as if going to see the show is activism. It isn't. Unless the audience does something about the issues raised, they are just consuming, like watching We Will Rock You. My rage got even more intense when I heard audience members acting like they deserve a man badge for listening. 

As it goes, the political logic is flawed, and ends up being defeatist. I'll blather on about how theatre is fundamentally middle-class (the way it is watched is all to do with the work of the romantics... another time, I promise). And here's a prime example: come see the lady rant, go home with leftist prejudices confirmed, and do nothing. 

This is where we get into my subjectivity, and this ought not bother you. If you don't go and see it, you lose. If you do, expect your conscience to be troubled by my anxiety.

There's Fighting in the Streets...

Mark Fisher recently accused me of confusing the romantic and modernist strands of theatre. He is quite right - although I conflate them rather than confuse them, because they are both vessels for the bourgeois theatre that has dominated for the past three hundred years.

After that provocation, here's an assumption to get up your nose.

I am afraid so. Because it is created within that culture, its hidden assumptions are all based on the dominant culture. Words like 'art', 'genius', 'dramaturgy', 'architecture': notions like 'playwright', 'actor',
'theatre' are all defined within a conversation developed by Diderot and the philosophes, and they were all about using art as a weapon against the power of the monarchical state and the church.

Even those performances that think they are presenting protest or an alternative perspective are doomed to remain within the dominant culture. 

Patriarchy, for example, lurks in the margins of feminist theatre. The state infects anarchist theatre. Those who speak of community are adopting a consumerist narrative. To put it another way...

The Glasgow School: Introduction

2014 has been a challenging year for performance in Glasgow. The deaths of Ian Smith, artistic director of Mischief La Bas, Adrian Howells, a pioneering maker of intimate theatre and David MacLennan, member of 7:84 and the founder of the successful A Play, A Pie and A Pint programme, have robbed Scotland of three imaginative and dynamic creators. The arrival of the Commonwealth Games, and its attendant cultural season, alongside the approach of the Referendum for Independence, has seen performance expand into new public spaces and become part of a dynamic debate on the future of Scotland.

In this context, Glasgow's performance communities have been presented to the world, and the importance of its arts as a tourist attraction and a way of defining the city's identity have become part of the council's strategies. In the visual arts, the Generation series of exhibitions has emphasised the growth of artistic endeavour and success over the past 25 years, while the selections made for the Commonwealth Games Culture strand have included writers, performers and venues that have a strong connection to the city's diverse traditions of theatre. Supported by a consistent calendar of festivals, performance in Glasgow has many strands, from the experimental live art influenced work often seen in The Arches through to the bold interpretations of classic texts at the Citizens.

The parallels with the visual art scenes are evident: performance takes many of its cues from the vitality of music communities and is confident in crossing boundaries of genre. New spaces, such as The Pipe Factory, continue a long-standing tradition of finding unusual spaces and curating different forms in a single event and artists like Raydale Dower frequently include a performance aspect in their gigs or exhibitions.

Dr Sarah Lowndes, now a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, wrote a comprehensive study of the visual art movements in Glasgow in the years running up to the turn of the century, Social Sculpture. This book not only provided a context for the successes of many Glasgow conceptual artists, who have dominated the Turner Prize in the past twenty years, but also traced the connections between the bands and visual artists that have given the city its distinctive aesthetic identity.

There has not, however, been a comparable study of the performance scenes in Glasgow, and this project hopes to take a snapshot of the communities that make events that are rooted in theatrical processes.

Dickin' About (sigh)

Philip  K Dick's brilliance lies in his ability to weave a detailed narrative from a profound concept. There are plenty of his short stories that are the science fiction equivalent of jokes - the final twist a mere cheeky punch-line. However, when he hits his stride, as in Captive Market, he is not only predicting possible futures - a classic trope that readily degenerated into many authors becoming painfully meta about their creativity - but providing a stark analysis of complex spiritual and political issues.

Captive Market has a crack at the mentality driving capitalism. A simple plot - old lady finds a way to reach the future, and uses it for  economic gain - is deftly expanded into a meditation on how the mentality of monopolies gambles with the species' future well-being. Aside from  the temporal fun (the old lady is both past and present, the sad remnants of humanity both her future and their own present), Dick reveals the economic transactions through deft characterisations and a nuanced allegory.

The old lady clearly represented the narrow minded dictates of capitalism: her only interest is in profit. Her ability to move into the future is reduced to a chance to have a captive market. The future, meanwhile, is in bad shape: it has plenty of paper money, and an equal amount of radioactive ash. Industry has collapsed, and the only hope is to escape the  polluted atmosphere. The old lady's weekly visits provide them with the necessary supplies: since the paper money is worthless in the future, they can afford the past's shameless price gouging.

Between the typical scenes of the apocalyptic future, Dick takes the literal worthlessness of paper money and makes a sly comment on inflation. Even without a thermonuclear war, the value of currency devalues over time. It's just another version of inflation. 

The old lady isn't just parasitic: she is trading on the back of the future's paucity of resources and hope: her customers are pinned down, and her skill is using the threat of extinction to maintain her profits. The idea that all capitalism is a gamble against the future is never far away. Then, in the final scene,  her ability to control the possible paths of time insists that the capitalist present is defining a bitter future. While the story is pessimistic on a personal level, its allegory is rougher.

Dick was never explicitly anti-capitalist, but he does suggest that trade is based on an unequal relationship, and lacks moral responsibility: the survivors of the end of the world can dwindle away, so long as she gets her cash. And even in the title, Dick is recognising a brutal truth: that for the shopkeeper, the best customer is powerless and desperate - and wealthy.

Thinking about art and politics (meh, I guess)

Back in 2011, during an early attempt by Arika to revitalise the festival format, a weekend at Tramway ended in a broad discussion about the relationship between politics and theatre. Disappointingly, the argument eventually boiled down to competing versions of Marxist theory: the "aestheticisation of politics" was castigated as a fascist trick, while performance was only considered political if it furthered a limited vision of revolutionary potential.

Arika's bold decision to give as much weight to discussion as the actual events can't be blamed for this degeneration: later festivals have encouraged further analysis and the jargon of Marxist dialectic has been questioned and critiqued. The debate, however, harks back to a lazy assumption that political theatre needs to be explicit and left-wing - the arts tend to attract leftists, perhaps because all art depends on a collective effort, or relies on state funding.

Unfortunately, this assumption denies something that even the British government has tried to emphasise: all social activity has a political dimension. The act of gathering together for a communal purpose is shared by religious ritual, political demonstration and live performance. Yet it is only in the last that a genuine diversity of opinion is encouraged. Making and attending theatre are equally political in nature.

Twentieth century political drama is overshadowed by Brecht. He wrote some nifty plays that critiqued capitalism, and developed theories towards a revolutionary theatre. While the USSR was juggling ways to set the arts at the service of international communism, surprisingly settling on ballet, Brecht was looking at ways to engage an audience in a manner revolutionary. The whole fourth wall issue was effectively defined by his thoughts.

However, art does not need to be leftist to be political. In fact, to say that it does undermines the political subtext of most theatre. Shakespeare wrote propaganda pieces for the state (The War of The Roses is more or less filtered through Shakespeare's version, even down to the physical appearance of one monarch), and the representation of mental health in Takin Over The Asylum, especially in the light of the ATOS controversy, has a very serious political implication.

Politics in art becomes not so much the product of an author's intention, as a function of the audience's interpretation and the context of the production. Any event funded by the state, say through Creative Scotland, has already made political choices. An interesting parallel is Nic Green's decision not just to make work that discusses ecology, but to consider the environmental impact of all aspects of its creation.

Arika's encouragement of reflection is beautiful. It not only hands theatre back to the audience - in the areas it covers, the artist is already privileged enough - but recognises the fundamentally public nature of performance. It also accords with the inclusive tendency in contemporary performance which tries to offer the audience a more immediate engagement. Whether it is the conversational one-to-ones of intimate theatre, the introduction of computer gaming to the NTS' Let The Right One In or the lively community work of Ignition in Shetland, theatre has become far more interested in getting the spectator involved.

Traditionally, theatre has been divided into community and professional categories. Through companies like Ankur, and the ambitions of Toonspeak, this line is dissolving. For the majority of artists, the work remains their project, however collective the devising. Yet once the idea of public engagement is more clearly established as integral to theatre's purpose