Hierarchy in Theatre: Community as Commodity

Hierarchy in Theatre: Eric Asks About Film

Hierarchy in Theatre: It always ends in a fight

Hierarchy in Theatre: Why Not Just Call It What It Is?

Hierarchy in Theatre: Enter the Patriarchy

Hierarchy in Theatre: What is wrong with you, Vile?

Hierarchy in Theatre: are you an oppressed mass?

Hierarchy in Theatre: Round Two!

Hierarchy in Theatre: the Battle begins!

A Big Load of Sex

Once upon a time, it was easy to review theatre. Start off with a quick plot synopsis, hand out praise and demerits to the various parts of the company, tag on a quick personal opinion and give it three non-committal stars.

Then post-modernism came along and started asking awkward questions about the nature of objectivity. The grand vision of Aeschylus, in which the very universe had a moral centre, was replaced by competing narratives, none of which could be called definitive. Even news journalism is challenged by the application of analysis that detects personal bias.

Plays started to get trickier. The classic creative process – a script, a director, a group of actors being told what to do and say – dissolved into a series of alternative strategies. This evolution opened up the stage to companies like Mammalian Diving Reflex, who are interested in using non-professional performers, devise a script in collaboration with them, and present an event that is about community as much as aesthetic display.

And so, All The Sex I Have Ever Had. Five people on stage reveal their life histories, with the emphasis on sexual interactions. Having signed a declaration not to “gossip” about the information relayed, it’s not right to say which character was promiscuous, or divorced, or even if any of them were. If I were not already hobbled by the self-doubt precipitated by age and a recognition of my own inevitable subjectivity, this contract cuts away much of the descriptive function of this review.

Fortunately, this reduces the task to a simple critique of the format (five speakers reading from a script, reducing their complex lives to the quality of a series of Facebook updates) and the apparent intention. Since the advertising made it clear that Sex concerned old people chatting about nookie, it’s probably something to do with making sex a legitimate topic for discussion, and undermining the prejudice that seniors are an alien race who didn’t ever have sex except for procreation, like your momma.

I was moved, in a vague and uncomfortable manner. That’s too easy: five strangers revealing their life story – unless it happens in a bar, then it’s irritating. I was annoyed, charming, never disgusted (there was generally a lack of detail on the sex acts, but it’s unlikely I can ever be shocked now that I have the Internet). Some of the characters offered dubious justifications for their antics. The most disturbing aspect was the way that the incidents were recounted. There was little emotional depth, sexual partners came and went. None of the characters were asked to assess their experiences, except in a rather wistful epilogue.

In the current social context, in which privacy is being replaced by shallow disclosure on-line, Sex, feels like the perfect play for the Facebook age.

A chain of sexual encounters, episodic, catalogued by year, notches on bedposts or amusing anecdotes: it reflects a commodification of experience, served up as something between entertainment and education. The audience is left to draw conclusions. The tone, like a therapy session, is non-judgmental.  

At this point, it is appropriate to commend the bravery of the performers and the skill of the team who helped them to remember and catalogue their lives. The show concludes, leaving questions about the way that lives are shaped by events, that personality is the product of opportunity and experience.

Then, it’s worth observing that, given the nature of The Arches’ audience, this performance had non-performers performing to an audience of performers. There’s a little irony, and perhaps a subtle inversion of the usual theatrical dynamic.

It’s all very emotional. It isn’t profound. Finding out that seniors had sex isn’t a revelation. The dry tone of the confessions refuses to connect the events into a personal history, or encourage any connection between the performers. Perhaps representing sexuality in a format other than the erotic or pornographic is enough.

Trying to fit a work like this into any sort of theatrical tradition is a challenge – it has roots in community theatre, amateur dramatics, devised performance, they do read from a script and Rob Jones did a fine job as a DJ-MC hybrid, hinting at cabaret. But the usual parameters – good acting, fine direction that interprets the script – are deliberately avoided. And if a work is trying to open up discussion, making the audience sign a non-disclosure agreement undermines the process.

I just kind of stop….

The Birth of Robocritic

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us here today. I know that you have all heard a great deal about our work here at Advanced Ideas Mechanics, and our reputation is not exactly squeaky clean. Those unfortunate battles with the Avengers, the rumours that we are planning to dominate the entire world through our technology, the rather stupid outfits we wear in our public appearances. And yet, today, I hope that we'll prove how A.I.M is working towards a better future for everyone.

In a moment, we shall unveil our latest, most powerful creation: Robocritic. As Robocop was touted as the future of law enforcement, we believe that Robocritic will redefine the critical appreciation of art. A team of scientists has been hard at it, working out definitions of performance, contemporary dance, electronic composition and aesthetics for the past seven years: their dedication has reached a culmination with Robocritic.

Like many scientists, we were inspired not by what already existed - a cohort of professional, serious professionals examining the arts from multiple perspectives - but a cheap science fiction film. It's well known that Star Trek's Spock (that's Mister, not Doctor - Dr Spock was an anarchist expert on parenting) inspired a generation of physicists to research outre ideas and write filthy stories about Captain Kirk and his science officer. Now A.I.M is proud to admit that a 1980s action thriller, with a side serving of social satire, has encouraged us to build something neither wholly human nor completely machine - but totally rad.

Robocritic was designed around three prime directives: to address all art forms and discuss their commonalities; to ceaselessly seek answers to questions previously considered irrelevant; to communicate those ideas in a format that allows plenty of argument. If asked to boil these down to a single slogan, we'd suggest: "Robocritic doesn't know, but he sounds like he does."

We had difficulty finding the right person for the job: our early experiments went awry, as the average human mind failed to cope with extended exposure to Live Art. Fortunately, when we discovered the broken body of Mr Criticulous - he succumbed to shingles after the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe, and has been wandering around shouting about "the death of the script" for the past twelve months - we had our consciousness. His Jesuit education had already taken him beyond the edge of reasonable philosophy, and his attempts to combine scientific method and theology as a method of aesthetic assessment mirrored our own madcap schemes to organise the world's governments under one system.

Just as soon as he stops talking in binary, Robocritic will be a regular guest on The Vile Blog. He'll be sent into territories that don't yet have clear definitions, and make a big enough fuss to, hopefully, set out some kind of map for further discussion.

Yeah, so what?

I was delighted when Michael Cox from Across the Arts read one of my reviews of Vanishing Point's Wonderland and exclaimed that I appeared to love it. Not because he had understood my feelings about a show that still has me pondering the morality of internet pornography, but rather because, at the time, I felt deeply ambivalent about Wonderland. Of course, that images remain with me months later, and the final lines of responsibility and guilt have not been completely unravelled in my mind, suggests that Wonderland is an important piece of theatre - at the time, I was more concerned to try and discover whether the format did justice to the seriousness of the content.

Aside from the intrinsic worth of attending and writing about performance and art - which is probably up for debate, anyway - the role of the critic can sometimes be mistaken for the arbitration of aesthetic absolutes. That is, the review is read as being an objective statement of an art work's value. The ambiguity of my review of Wonderland, which led to Michael Cox interpreting it in a way I had not expected, undermines any claim I might make to objectivity, and transfer the review into a far more interesting and fertile realm. It becomes, like the artwork itself, an object for discussion. Like a three minute pop song, or a sonnet, the review can condense complex ideas into an accessible format, and hopefully provoke a reaction.

I'd be shy to insist that my reviews have the same aesthetic worth as the art itself - it all depends on the quality of the production, and its relationship to the audience's interest - I'm not uncomfortable recognising the critic as an artist. Whether any particular critic is a good or bad artist is another matter, but my rather lazy working definition of the artist - anyone who is primarily motivated by their desire to express - allows documentary makers, scientists and musicians to share the label.

Critical writing is in a different relationship to art than, say, electronic music, although it shares certain commonalities, such as its status as an expression of the creator's perspective on certain experiences. Since I would argue that the purpose of criticism is to provoke and prolong an argument or discussion, it is as close to political theatre or conceptual art as it is to more frequently considered companions like reportage.

The problem that criticism has is not so much intrinsic to the critics or their process, but the way it is experienced. Most critics have a particular platform that comes with an audience - The Telegraph shares few readers with The Guardian, for example, meaning the readers read both news and arts writing from a particular expectation. While Across the Arts offers a compendium of often competing reviews about the same works, most readers don't trawl the arts page to find out what the overall consensus might be on a particular piece.

The traditional "use" of a review makes a blog like this useless: the double review of Greig's Dusinane reflects not a definitive statement on the script but the opposing possibilities the play offers about Scottish and British identity. Had Cox not already seen Wonderland, and was kind enough to trust my opinion, he might have thought my support for it implied he ought to catch it. On the contrary, I'd be reluctant to recommend a play about violent pornography to anyone unless I was really sure they were going to be okay with the content.

Instead, I'd like to think the best that I can offer is a few ideas, expressed in such a way that the reader can respond to them freely, winkle out my prejudices, suss out my dishonesty and bounce concepts a little further along the discussion. I think that is probably what art does anyway...