Desire: an encounter with a play by Kathy Acker

Enjoyably baffling, as I was expecting. I have neither a strongly positive nor a strongly negative reaction to the Woosters’ tepidness: it is what it is, and I’m obscurely happy someone somewhere is exploring their really particular aesthetic. They definitely have, like, a schtick: audio fed to performers via headphones, scrolling text on CRTs, a way of both acknowledging the original context of works and also kind of gently exploding that context.

As with their Emperor Jones, which I saw yonks ago, I wonder if this approach is really the best for material like Acker's dealing with intensity. Acker isn’t exactly a dispassionate writer. And yet also the Wooster thing—their suite of concepts, whatever you want to call it—lets us grapple with things that might be too uncomfortable to otherwise stage. In the loveliest moments, a one-person vocoder duet between Romeo and Juliet, the avant-garde weirdball weirdness yielded moments of real loveliness. At other points, you know, it was vague and a little bit uncomfortable and kind of amorphous. Definitely one (1) unit of late New York avant-garde; I left with the feeling of the dutiful art-goer rewarded with some capital-A art. What I didn't feel was in any sense wrenched apart, or confronted with a truth of the universe; once again, instead, I got intensity in quotation marks.

There is a Light that Never Goes Out: SCENES FROM THE LUDDITE REBELLION (Royal Exchange/Kandinsky, 3 Aug 2019)

You’d have to be dead inside not to be excited by the prospect of Luddite theatre in Manchester. My hopes were so high for this—the fabulous, simple set, a bold swash of red in the middle of my favourite theatre building in England; the possibility of seeing labour history recreated in its actual Manchester location. (Or, I mean, nearby—the Exchange has moved several times over the years, but near enough.) And some scenes were great: the smashing of the Exchanges windows, and even the first couple of appearances by General Ludd, brought into existence by a coat and a vocoder. One of the actors wore lovely purple Chuck Taylors, but had crossed out the “Converse” logo on the heels—a way to remind the audience of the texture of manufactured goods in our own lives.

For the rest, this was solid eat-your-broccoli, learn-your-facts-and-gosh-aren’t-they-still-sort-of-relevant stuff. Nutritional, but not particularly exciting. There can be not-all-that fantastic theatre that’s still worthwhile. The premise here was, as the title suggests, to give a patchy history of the Luddite movement, with whatever wasn’t covered in historical documents patched up with modern speech. And, it must be said, modern television cliché. The conversations between a secret society informer and his police, I guess, handler in particular could be guessed in advance; the domestic dialogue of a protesting handloom weaver and his factory worker daughter grappled with Northern clichés (“No girl of mine wut work in factory,” my notes say—you get the idea.) The comparison between traditional crafts and machine manufacture creating new, cheaper, lower-quality clothing has of course contemporary relevance. Of course, the last thing I saw at the Exchange had lamenting the end of industrialisation—the shutting down of the coal industry—and now this was an attack on its beginnings, and the creation of the heavy industry that would use that coal. (Look for my The Theatre of Regional Grievance, my upcoming monograph.)

The production borrowed heavily from ideas promoted by (among others) EP Thomson: that prior to industrialization, handloom weavers lived according to their own schedules; factories destroyed this self-scheduled Eden. All well and good—but then this needed dialogue that was less, frankly, industrial: a reproduction of what gets said in analogous TV productions, rather than any sort of formal challenge to its norms. I can remember no standout line of dialogue: instead, every class position, every crux of dialogue seemed borrowed from the most generic sources.

education education education (Wadrobe Ensemble/Trafalgar Studios, 10 June 2019)

Still haunted by the question of a friend in town for the Cumberbatch Hamlet: “does all London theatre have to do that dance thing?” They were referring to the tendency of productions to juxtapose naturalistic, or at least somewhat naturalistic, scenes of dialogue with more abstract dance bits—the characters twirl around, to represent angst or whatever. Used correctly, this kind of interrupted motion can convey lots of information, theme, mood—really anything.
 

Used badly, and you get whatever this was. A tribute of sorts to education at the cusp of the Blair years, and of course a sad Brexit coda, education education education played out as a kind of b-list My Country: A Work in Progress, from several years ago at the NT. Characters who Represent the Nation, As Well as Idiosyncratic Persons occupy space at a comprehensive school Somewhere in England. The audience of course hooted at the easy signifiers of nineties-ness and school-ness: Spice Girls! Sweatshirts with school crests! And the actors went through the expected motions: a violence, a shag, a rueful, a drink. (I’m not the first foreigner to remark on the English tendency to see the secondary school years as somehow the cradle of civilization.) There was even a visit from King Arthur, reflecting a general tendency to repeat every plot point or Significant Statement About the Nation at least twice, if not more. 

I didn’t like a lot of things about this—in particular, the scene transitions just didn’t work. In a repeated metaphor made flesh, the characters spun around as if underwater, while the narrator helpfully explained that this was because they were feeling overwhelmed. But maybe more significantly, this thing was just less out of the bubble it was trying to comment on than it thought it was. Narrated by a German stereotype of a visiting German teacher, the play wanted to make some sort of statement on England. But the England it was commenting on was a homogenous place, indeed. There were Germans in England, even in 1997; there were also ethnicities beyond, say, the list of echt-English names given during a roll call of students. And the long, lyrical account of the German Reichstag building, and the idea of politics it represented--legislators looking up at the people they served--suggested that any such political possibility could not be found in the country itself. Even when hymning European politics, the play could not imagine itself part of them. The shrug at a nationalism drowning in slightly shit mythology was, itself, a bit shit and lazily nationalistic—or at least blinkered, in what it imagined the nation to be. 

Odder still, if telling, was the play’s allocation of character attributes. The English teachers were easily recognizable types: the gym teacher who reads the Daily Mail, the passionate bearded language teacher, the bitchy would-be head teacher who is inevitably female. The play let men be passionate defenders of the inchoate truth, and women shrewish ball-breakers with temporarily lapses into random shagging. Finally, the only efficient technocrat was German: a stand-in for the chilly EU, I guess—but also a clear othering of anything that wasn’t typical, muddling-through, Englishness. I’m sure the play’s devisers think of themselves as staunch anti-Brexit types—but their assertion of the Englisness, the typicality, of England, “soggy” though the nation may be, they revealed themselves as more a piece with the Leave mindset than they seemed to believe. So this had its slightly crap cake and ate it too, in the process overwriting the genuine hope—and the actual, practical gains—of the Blair years. Its assertion of the naffness of King Arthur itself kept bringing him to the stage. If the monoculture keeps producing such dreary stories, maybe theatre-makers should start looking elsewhere for their inspirations.