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.