The Magic of Theatre (Warning: contains pontification)

Since I spend most of my time at the theatre - and believe that it is the natural forum for advancing the discussion of the issues most intimate and germaine to human existence - I have been trying to develop a theory of "what makes theatre good". My students at Tramway's Young Critics session can back me up when I say that I am happiest using whatever theory justifies my instinctive opinion, whether it's the Wikipedia version of Marxism or a variation on Aristotle's (pretty nonsensicle) notion of the Unities.

Being an autodidact doesn't help. What I am about to present has probably been explained before, in far more detail, by an author that I haven't read. It might also be a variation on the "suspension of disbelief" riff that I vaguely remember from University. I plead for tolerance and forgiveness. Also, I do have a really cool chart that helps me work out my star ratings, but I can't print that here because it is copyrighted by a serious philosopher and I like to reveal it to my students as a surprise. If I give it away here, there's no reason to join the Young Critics programme, apart from the chance to see a load of cool plays, listen to my weekly enthusiasms and become part of the new generation of informed, motivated critics.

This idea - such as it is - occurred to me halfway through The Fantasist during the Fringe. Theatre Temoin come from a physical theatre background, and admitted that this was their first stab at puppetry. They timed it well - puppetry is definitely this year's big thing - and applied it to appropriate content (The Fantasist is primarily an attempt to represent a distressed consciousness).

The main character, a young woman suffering from bi-polar, is descending into mania and is forced to make a choice: to either accept the mania, symbolised by a larger-than-life puppet of a sophisticated lover, or get back on the tablets and forge a reasonable life in the world of the sane.  As the lover hung over her closet, and manipulated her movements, I experienced a sudden dislocation of my perception. I realised that I was watching two things simultaneously.

The literal scene involved a real human being manipulated by a puppet. It had enough irony and meaning to keep me happy. The inanimate object controls the living being. The puppet was a figment of her imagination, and the literal sight caught the paradox of how the imagination can be more powerful than the person doing the imagining.

Then there is the scene being acted out - the pretend, the fictional. If I suspended disbelief - or have one of my sporadic bouts of insanity where everything becomes not what it is, but what it means - there was a monster emerging from the darkness and commanding a woman. The literal representation reinforced the imagery, but the metaphorical reading had its own power. I knew that if I watched the same scene in a film, it wouldnot have the same impact (unless the director was able to signpost the puppet's nature, initating the dual vision I receive in theatre). Film's veracity - it could always be a documentary - precludes the same immediacy and - dare I say it - alienation of my perception.

So the peculiar power of theatre lies in that ability to reveal two versions at the same time. Discuss.
That explanation is pretty dense - I reckon there's a PhD in it for someome with patience. However, I am a critic, not an academic. I'll give a few more examples, and run away, hoping not to get flamed.

There are two long sequence's in Sylvia Dow's A Beginning, A Middle and An End when the characters build up, and then dismantle the set. On the literal level, it's a way of setting the stage without having to have an interval, a bunch of stage hands wandering about, putting the tables and chairs in place, covering the space with advocado trees, reminding the audience that they are watching a fiction.

On the other, it's a montage sequence about how - in the first sequence - a couple build up their relationship through the accumulation of household items and how - in the second - the death of a partner is like a diminution of the self.

The second session rather reminded me of this great joke about a blind man and a dishonest doctor.
In the context of Dow's play, however, both interpretations feed the play's impact. Part of Dow's point is the way in which people build up their lives through the telling of stories and the interludes beautifully, and literally, illustrated the process of addition and subtraction that feeds the story.

By contrast, a less effective version appeared in Macbeth 2008, one of the many Polish pieces that appeared in the August Festivals. A two tier set was used as a series of stages for this updating of the Scottish play, and the literalism of the helicopter landing pad, battlements and boudoir locked the interpretation into a very literal representation. As soon as the Naughty Man started banging on about "daggers" and lineage, while standing in front of a washing machine and toting a big machine gun, the gap between Shakespeare's words and this contemporary, relevant reading (Macbeth being involved in some clash with Islamic militants) became too wide. The literal and the metaphorical could not hold.

Meanwhile, Boris and Sergey's Vaudevillian Adventure went to town on the disjuncture between the puppet's self-determination and the presence of six puppeteers keeping them going.

Inevitably, I haven't got to the bottom of this one yet. Earlier today, I was walking around Glasgow listening to Public Enemy. In my head, I was being Chuck D in rage mode, knowing that I was really just a shabby critic rushing to interview a dancer at Scottish Ballet. Yet in some way, I held both states in my attention, ready to either act like  Chuck, and threaten the stability of social order with a few well-placed words, or return to Gareth, and help an old lady with directions to the shops.

It's the gap there, and the gap between the real and the potential on the stage, that allows magic to flourish.

The Fantasist

The Fantasist centres around an individual struggle for control over mental illness: specifically looking at bi-polar in its more manic phase, it combines puppetry, physical theatre and humour to describe the interior state of a patient who embraces the thrill of abandonment. While Theatre Temoin acknowledge that this is their first use of puppets, they take full advantage of the inanimate characters to present a world unfamiliar, frightening and funny.

Mental states, especially bad mental health, are notoriously difficult to display in art. Fortunately, The Fantasist does not follow the typical show business "undefined mental illness" stereotype, and in a superb performance by Julia Yevnine, reveals the enthusiasm and intensity of a manic fugue. The looming appearance of a larger than life male puppet, who has echoes of Bluebeard, are threatening: if the comic interludes, including a song about the dangers and delights of being seduced, sometimes break the mood, they maintain the heightened awareness of the main character.

Director Ailin Conant and her devising team of Yevnine, Cat Gerrard and Julia Correa picture the heroine's broken sensitivity to time and communication: a friendship is damaged, a nurse dismissed through the same conversation happening simultaneously on-stage but apart in real time. The ambiguity of the ending, when the real and the fantastic are finally confused, emphasises how bi-polar is not easily cured. Its connection to creativity and inevitable destructiveness are identified succinctly: Yevnine's Louise is both artist and patient, and it is the tension between the two that forces her to question whether the real is better than the hallucination.

There are a few weak points in the production: Yevnine's performance is so powerful that it reduces the others to bit-part players, and the nurse's imprecations are unconvincing against the magic of the imagined world portrayed by the puppets; the manipulation of certain objects is relatively clumsy against the puppet work. Yet the aims of representing the bi-polar mind on stage, and following an individual story towards a conclusion are successful. This is one play that elucidates rather than mystifies the workings of the unbalanced mind.

Vulnerable (Top Five)

Today, I am feeling vulnerable. Whenever I leave the office, I am surrounded by posters that are covered in stars. They feel like bullets, forged by critics but used by companies to shoot each other in the war for resources. I don't like it, I don't like reducing a critical opinion to a quotation, let alone the blank, unblinking sequence of stars. I'm a pretentious type, and I like to think that criticism is an art defined in much the same way as poetry. When when the precious words that a critic has forged into linked chains of meaning are deconstructed down to a signifier of cultural worth, I am unhappy.

How can I respond? How about a top five for feeling vulnerable? Works for me...

"This piece combines puppetry with physical theatre, so you've got human actors playing opposite puppet creatures," says Ailin Conant about her show The Fantasist. "I guess it's like some kind of Jacques Lecoq / Jim Henson mash-up."

The Fantasist appropriately expresses the bi-polar experience by juxtaposing two styles of theatre: modestly, Conant insists that the puppetry is something new for her: " I kind of fantasize about the conversations that "real" puppet companies might have in the rehearsal room: What puppeteer costuming will serve this puppet best?  An understated cap or full Bunraku black hoods?  In our rehearsal you're much more likely to hear something like, Is this hood-thingie keeping the focus off my face, or do I just look like a wanker?"

Fortunately, this endearing self-deprecation is backed up by a ken theatricality and an emphasis on using the approaches as means to end - her description of the mash up might suggest what is going on, but it does not prepare the audience for what has been touted by a Skinny reviewer as a highlight of the festival.

Underbelly, 3- 27 August

The critical world is going mad about The Shit, a late night burst of Italian outrage and disgust. Since it has a naked women ranting and howling and screaming - the words aren't so much about their meaning but the sound they make as they scatter and shatter and settle - this is more about vulnerability being portrayed on stage. I can't help but be reminded of some of Kathleen Hanna's (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) more challenging moments, and there is a huge poster of performer Silvia Gallerano outside Summerhall that is bracing and frightening in equal manner.

Summerhall, 3 -27 August

Songs of Lear is another Summerhall special, and another entry from Poland. It's surprising to see a company associated with a visceral theatre (Song of the Goat are another one of those central European companies who give equal weight to body and word) present what appears to be a choral concert: each episode is introduced by the director - he explains that this is not a version of Shakespeare's Lear but uses the text as "a landscape" and each scene is best read as a portrait - and the company begin in their sunday best black.

Despite the formal beginning, the forces within the text (the ingratitude of the child, the emotional violence of the father, the threat of insanity and the truth spoken as folly) gradually dominate the performers: snatches of esoteric instrumentation, invocations of Coptic song, stamping feet and an incredible, unexpected drum solo interpret the familiar story and tease out the despair and struggle that is lost in versions that rely on text and old school tricks like mere acting. 

By avoiding too much plot, the characters become the focus. Cordelia's lament gives depth to a character that Shakespeare couldn't be bothered to flesh out (she's a dull paragon of honesty in the original; here, she is the victim of her father's immaturity with a series of disappointments reaching back into childhood): Gloucester is less the doddering idiot than a thoughtful courtier, sensing the approaching storms. Lear himself is spoilt, absurd and, ultimately tragic.

The production consciously avoids much of traditional theatricality. The lighting is simply a wash of one colour, the costumes are formal wear, the only props are instruments, the script is broken apart and appears only as fragments within songs. Yet somehow Song of the Goat achieve that beautiful connection with the audience: the standing ovation is deserved and proves that total theatre - using all the tricks - is not necessarily the only way to fulfil the potential of the stage.

Summerhall, 13 - 25 August

Perhaps my vulnerability was caused by seeing Dusty Limit's show last night. When he proudly announced that he is dead inside, my own cavernous interior echoed his words. The Girl with No Heart seems to plug into my own concerns, yet when Sparkle and Dark decorated their venue with origami cranes, the effect was more one of beauty than misery.

The Girl goes back to the nuclear assault on Hiroshima- itself a reminder of how ultimately vulnerable the entire human species is - and has a staging made entirely of paper. Despite the immensity of the subject, they tell a parable rather than a tragedy, and locate the power to build or destroy in the imagination and emotions of a young child.

The paper cranes came about because there is a Japanese legend that to fold a thousand cranes will lead to the fulfilment of a wish. Let's hope the company don't waste that wish on longing for a five star rating...

Bedlam, 3 -24 August

the Fantasist

This year at the Fringe, I am mostly excited by object manipulation. Mostly, this consists of cutting and pasting press releases to look like I came up with the artist's smart ideas, but I just found out that this is actually the cool way to refer to the art form formerly known as puppetry. It's nice when on and off stage can come together so easily.

The Fantasist is not just object manipulation - it has a title that probably describes my mental state. Ailin Conant, Artistic Director of Theatre Témoin took some time to answer my questions about their debut at the Fringe.
I am going to start off the same every time ... the dread question - why the fringe?

That's a bit like saying, "Why drop acid," or even "Why make a play," is it not?  It's not like you can sit down and rationally list the pros and cons of the Edfringe experience to come out with a balance sheet that clearly indicates a steady return on some kind of calm investment.  You do it because there's something in the experience itself that will take you further as a human being and an artist.  You do it because it will exhaust and surprise you.  And you do it because something amazing will come out of it in the end, even if it's usually not the thing you expected it to be.  

I am excited about the rise of puppetry: I am really getting into it at the moment. Can you tell me a little about how this piece uses puppetry, why it is a good technique for the story, and how it might fit into the tradition of puppetry?

This piece combines puppetry with physical theatre, so you've got human actors playing opposite puppet creatures...I guess it's like some kind of Jacques Lecoq / Jim Henson mash-up.  Actually, to be more specific, we have one human character, Louise, playing against a slew of puppets that represent her various inner voices and moods.  The style has proven incredibly useful in allowing us to explore an internal, private world in an external and poetic way.  I find that puppets are more evocative than their human counterparts because they're a blank slate - as an audience you can project your own darkest bile and lightest affection on them in a way that is much harder to do with live actors.  


In terms of "tradition," you'd actually probably have a clearer idea of that than I would.  This is our first puppet show and we tackled puppetry the same way we tackle most things - we mucked in and figured it out as we went along.  It wasn't until after we started building the show in 2011 that we got really into studying puppetry and going to workshops.  We've probably learned the most about "tradition" from conversations with keen puppet-theatregoers in the bar after our performances.  I kind of fantasize about the conversations that "real" puppet companies might have in the rehearsal room: "What puppeteer costuming will serve this puppet best?  An understated cap or full Bunraku black hoods?"  In our rehearsal you're much more likely to hear something like, "Is this hood-thingie keeping the focus off my face, or do I just look like a wanker?"

The Fantasist deals with issues of mental ill-health. How easy is it to get across the bipolar mind set on stage?

It's about as easy as it is to get across any mindset on stage, which is to say, not easy.  In a way, it's not the "bipolar" part that's most challenging, it's the "mind" part, the internal part, the part about trying to visibly stage something that is by definition intangible and invisible.  Once you develop a language for that, you can communicate anyone's experience--"healthy" and "sane" are subjective concepts anyways; they only apply in the context of a person's behaviour in relation to other human beings.  


What goes on in someone's mind--anyone's mind--is so full of swirling and often incomprehensible ups and downs that, shown from the inside, we're all a bit mad.  That's perhaps the most important thing to understand about this piece and our approach to it: our attraction to this theme came from a place of deep empathy, as two of the original devising cast had had direct personal experience as carers of bipolar family members.  So our goal is not to map out and define the differences that constitute a "bipolar mind."  It's actually the other way around--we go into Louise's head to uncover and make visible the myriad ways in which she is just like us.
 Theatre Témoin have done work in the past with soldiers suffering from trauma. Was this a form of therapy, and how did it work?

The company has a done a great deal of work with ex-combatants in the last few years, it's been kind of a personal meditation of mine.  It all started with Nobody's Home, an Odyssey adaptation that I was co-developing with a company called Grafted Cede (you might have seen us at the Gilded Balloon last year).  Basically as soon as we made the link between Odysseus's epic "fight to get home after war" and the seemingly unending stream of stories about returning Afghan - and Iraq - War vets who were battling their own post-war monsters, we saw that the myth was a perfect vehicle for exploring war trauma and soldiers' returns.  


We built the show based on a great deal of reading and research, but as civilians with no personal experience of PTSD, were all slightly terrified of actually touring the show to real veteran's communities. We decided to hold a response and development workshop with American Combat Vets as part of the first leg of our tour, which was nothing like "therapy" and much more like "specialist consulting." It was a total blag - here I am cold-calling VA centres and promising a "mutually beneficial creative exchange" when in reality I have no idea what ex-soldiers might want that we can offer and vice versa. In the end, though, it was brilliant.  We were a small team: myself, the 2 actors, one psychologist, four veterans, and an external applied drama facilitator who we hired in so that it wasn't us leading the sessions. 


The vets saw the show and then in the workshop we basically forum-ed it.  They would be like, "play back that scene with the Cyclops" and the actors would get up and start playing until one of the vets would shout "freeze" and then jump on stage to show us something so spot-on that it would immediately get incorporated into the subsequent performances.  For us it was about understanding and communicating the story as clearly as we could, and for the vets it was about having a voice and making sure that we were telling their story.  Was it theraputic?  Certainly, for all of us.  But "therapy" was never the stated goal, and I'm always a bit suspicious of any creatvive activity where it is.  I think there's a humility that we have to have as artists; the ability to say, "this is as much about my growth and learning as it is yours, we're all in this together, we're all building towards one collective external goal--one piece of theatre."  I think anything less than total collaboration indicates a lack of respect, an inability to take someone on equal footing as a peer with things to teach to us and learn from us.  


Since that workshop I've done a number of creative projects with and by groups of ex-combatants.  In Lebanon I worked with former commanders from opposing sides of the civil conflict to write a play.  In Rwanda I worked with a group of recently demobilized child soldiers to stage a devised piece.  In Israel I interviewed wounded IDF combatants to create a verbatim text.  In every project the collaborative spirit - the philosophy of shared goals and efforts - remained the same.
 
Sorry for throwing in such big questions in  so small a space... 
We love big questions in small spaces!  That's Fringe theatre defined! 


Underbelly, 3 -27 August