Counterflows @ Glasgow

The Straw Chair (Borderline)

The revival of Sue Glover's script The Straw Chair is a canny move by Borderline theatre company. It hasn't been seen outside of the central belt before, even though it belongs to a period when Scottish theatre was developing a powerful tradition of scripted theatre. Glover herself can be seen as one of the dynamic artists who, in the 1980s, began to give Scotland scripts strong enough to challenge the best international work and, unlike 7:84's famous Cheviot, offer a repertory of plays that could be recreated. 

Bondagers went on to become Glover's most revived script -

perhaps because it gives more opportunity for the dynamic mix of physical and scripted theatre that has dominate theatre during the 1990s and influenced the first generation of National Theatre of Scotland's artistic directors (Blackwatch is a well-known example of how movement was used as a story-telling device). Yet The Straw Chair examines similar themes - the nature of the rural environment and its impact upon its residents, Scotland's history and the oppression of women. But while the scope of Bondagers is broader, covering an entire community, and more explicit in attacking a feudal system, The Straw Chair is more detailed and precise. A single woman's fate is at stake.

Lady Grange - possibly the protagonist of The Straw Chair, since her biography formed the inspiration for Glover's script - is a difficult character. An alcoholic, when circumstances allow and a thief, in order to make circumstances allow for alcoholism, she is an unlikely heroine and has little of the dignity required for her to be a symbol of women's oppression. Having irritated her husband, and possibly threatened his political and social security, she is abducted and dumped on St Kilda. Her attempts to escape are foiled, and she is finally defeated, embracing something that appears like madness.

This much is historical: whether her sexual intensity and regal antagonism to her maid is equally historical or Glover's imagination is theatrically irrelevant, but it makes her a superb female role. Raging against her husband and his allies, encouraging the desire of the recently arrived couple, she has a tragic dignity, if not social respectability. Yet she exists in a stasis. Trapped by geography and her memories of a decadent past, Grange turns inward, wasting her intelligence on plotting how to steal brandy and provoke her companions. Her moving final speech, in which she ruminates on her fate, is hardly an acceptance but a fragmented attempt to make sense of her doom.

Yet her story is explicitly an example of injustice, how the Scotland of the early 1700s handled problematic women, excluding them through force and violence. The arrival of a minister, who initially regards her with distaste, allows Glover to emphasise the gap between the civilised veneer of Edinburgh society - piety and aspiration - and the harsh treatment of those who did not fit. His faith in the good offices of Edinburgh gentlemen is destroyed by the end of the play. Coming to accept Lady Grange's victimhood, his Christianity forces him to reject the social order that might offer him a livelihood. 

This tension, between the oppression of women and the smiling

piousness that managed it, drives The Straw Chair. By being set on St Kilda. it embraces the romanticism of the islands, even as it reveals the hardship of the island life. The recollections of Edinburgh and its niceties contrast the tough yet simple lives on St Kilda against a dishonest luxury. Lady Grange's confusion, aided by drink and spurred on by her husband's infidelity, becomes the confusion of a nation caught between urban and rural modes of living.

Borderline's production gives the script plenty of space, placing the performances and scenography at the service of the words and disguising the social commentary beneath an apparently period drama. The love for St Kilda expressed by the minister, his wife and the single character who lives on the island by birth and choice echoes the romantic call for simpler times - even the sincere religion of the islanders is uncomplicated by the detail of theology and tangled in more pagan worships - yet the power comes from the mainland and  the aristocratic system that enables trade.  

Scottish identity has become a major theme in contemporary theatre - Dunsinane  grappled with it, and even Some Other Mother, a play that is about the injustices of immigration, asks questions about how Scotland defines itself against other countries. The Straw Chair casts a critical eye over the past, juggles with a true story and the idealism that imagines St Kilda as a lost paradise, provoking most where it entertains.

The Four Qualities of the Critic

Okay, let me play fair.

Ultimately, this is all a justification of my life as a critic. There is no absolute distinction between reviewer and critic. And there are no rules about who can be a critic. If someone wants to call themselves a critic, or get a job reviewing, my rambles are only relevant if they care what I think. Fortunately, that doesn't matter.

It's a matter of pride, and turf war. I try to keep the idea of the critic clean so that I can claim some kind of status, and stop other writers wandering onto my patch. Keeping actors out of criticism is a selfish occupation. 

That isn't to say that makers writing about theatre is bad, just that it needs to be put in context. 

Having said all of that, I am going to tell you what I think a critic is - and when I have failed to be one. Then I am going to divide the critic into three categories (sorry, I'll probably be doing that stupid thing where I pretend to have summoned Aristotle back from the dead, again).

Chapter One: The Primary Qualities of a Critic

Of these. there are four. They may be said to be technical and emotional in nature. 

The Technical Qualities

Mr Dusc did this

An advanced literacy may be said to be the most essential of all skills possessed by the critic. Putting together a sentence in a manner coherent and charming, understanding the length of a paragraph for maximum readability: these are the foundation of all writing. 

Knowledge of context is a further necessity, although this is the least of all qualities. Being able to recognise the difference between a scripted play and a devised choreography is helpful. It enables authority and trust, and leaves not the author open to accusations of not knowing what they are watching.








The Emotional Qualities
Generosity is at the heart of a critical process: the generosity that

does not single out individuals and blame them for the failure of a work, recognising that all art is a collaboration. Generosity knows that it is subjectivity, and that what is seen is a function of the way it is seen. No artist makes bad work on purpose, and the bravery of artistic effort is to be respected. And generosity tries to understand what the piece is trying to achieve, and begin the critique from this understanding.

Yet honesty stands between generosity and lack of critique: the critic says what they see and what they feel (not what they wished for, or what might makes things 'better'). This is the only authority that the critic can claim: that they said what they felt - even if they have to apologise for it later. Like I have had to, on many occasions.

The Overlap Between Journalism and Criticism

The reanimated philosopher ran a finger over the parchment, flaking skin and dripping blood on its rumpled surface. His left eye-ball slipped slightly from the socket as he swivelled to face his tormentor.

"What the hell are these circles supposed to represent? All the elegance has gone out of psychic cartography," he moaned.

"It is a Venn Diagram representing the overlap of criticism, journalism and reviewing," I replied. "It reveals that the three disciplines are not exclusive domains."

"You might as well draw any three placements of the circles, make 'em concentric, air bubbles in a body of water, three parallel lines that intersect. If we're making shit up..."

"I wouldn't have sacrificed a goat to you if I'd known you wouldn't help."

"Drawing nice pictures and pretending that they map reality isn't my business," Aristotle snarled. "That is the stock in trade of the charlatan Plato. Big statements and no evidence."

"He's busy working as Russell Brand's ghost-writer." I snapped. "I wanted to continue my thoughts on the difference between critics and reviewers."

"That's bloody simple, sunshine. A reviewer reviews: they look at an event, and comment on it. A critic uses a broader frame of reference, maybe context, maybe some half-baked idea he stole from the pocket of a corpse."

"Isn't it a question of naming activity, rather than ascribing functions to already established categories?"

"Along with most of your readership, I have no idea what that means. Hang on, is this a dialogue?"

"I thought it was the best dramatic format to engage you..."

"Dialogues are Platonic. Send me back to hell, right now."

"Nay, thou shalt stay within thy circle and enumerate for me the qualities and nature of the critic."

Religious Theatre

I wonder whether I have substituted theatre for God. In Nicholas

Cook's A Very Short Introduction to Music, he observes that, in the nineteenth century, when science was eroding traditional Christian beliefs, art became an alternative religion, smuggling in ideas of spirituality through the emphasis on the artist as a genius, channelling their music from an exterior source. 

Although this is most evidence in the cult of Beethoven - which endured through much of the twentieth century - it is reflected in the romantic poets (my beloved Blake, for example, was engaged in the writing of new scripture), and accounts for the ongoing sanctification of Shakespeare, Brecht, even Artaud. The vogue for branding a company or writer (it's Rob Drummond's Wrestling, or Dominic Hill's Hamlet, or the RSC's Macbeth) is a product of both consumerism and this religious veneration of the creator. Cook recognises that the impulse towards religiosity emerged with the rise of industrialisation, in Europe, and the model of capitalism that has come to dominate Western culture. 

Those political worries aside, which will make for another post in the future, the idea that theatre is now my religion is deeply worrying. Having been bought up in the last days of a society which cherished religion, the grand theologies of the west still echo in my consciousness, and shape my thought. Yet the onslaught of intelligent atheist commentary - and the bellowing of its propagandists - make it difficult to accept Christianity without qualification.

And so, in the search for the transcendent, have I turned to theatre? Have I become a writer of exegesis for a contemporary metaphysics, one that contains the idea of the genius in place of God? Have the hierarchies of angels been replaced by the structures of a venue's employment policies? Am I seeking a connection with the divine, the absolute Truth, by attending a performance?

The impact of this possible substitute on criticism is another problem. The traditional answer of the religious critic to ideas that challenge their belief is to call it heresy. The stakes become higher. Tynan's famous, and inane, comment that a negative review of a play is like a letter from a disappointed lover, sets theatre on the level of a sexual relationship - and anyone familiar with Othello knows that this is an especially fraught scenario. When it becomes a matter of religion, the dangers are greater. 

Equally, it asks theatre to perform a task that it may never have been equipped to fulfil: shedding light on the dark maze of human experience. The ambitions of Beckett, in Waiting for Godot, undeniably are towards explicating existence, but this kind of existential aspiration is another product of the past century, exactly the period in which, according to Cook, art-as-religion took hold. For all the pretty poetry, do Shakespeare's plays intend to cast such wisdom into the audience? 

The author Alan Moore describes the artistic process in terms of a shamanistic journey into a reality that imitates Plato's world of forms - or, more exactly, the cabalistic mythologies that he studies. It's the religious view of art par excellence, presenting the artist as a traveller into the beyond. That only theological language can be used to describe his vision - no 'sitting on your arse and typing' for him, or detailed research - exposes the extent to which some artists see their work as sacred. 

A theologian is not necessarily a good critic: the appreciation of art, taught in schools as English literature, musicology and appraisal, begins with an  a priori truth that the object of study is 'good' (worthy of analysis, and offering a message to be decoded in a recognisable style). The theologian, at least in the Christian tradition, has the same foundation: God is good, worthy of veneration. Any study that suggests the opposite, like Gnostic dualism, gets dumped into the category of heresy.

And so the critic who examines theatre as a theologian is forced into a dualism. Either the work reveals the 'truth' - in which case it is good and gets four stars - or it is falsehood, and gets two stars and is a heresy. It's not just that theatre is a bad substitute for God - it makes no moral demands, no applicable commandments for behaviour outside of the auditorium. God is a bad model for theatre.