I am back in the National, and we are back in the world of experimental theatre. We have a text, by Martin Crimp, which is divided into sections to be spoken by different (unspecified) actors, but thereafter everything is up for the director (here Katie Mitchell) and the Company to decide, such as who says what, and what the staging is to be.
And the staging is certainly all busy busy. Busy busy bees. Sometimes the whole cast recite lines in the theatrical equivalent of a first person plural narrator, sometimes smaller groups. Some of it is sung / played. For the most part, the performance is filmed and projected, with some manipulation. The effect is of a collection of pastiches, of cheesy pop videos, of news, of funny foreign daytime tv, of Newsnight Review. The trouble with this is that it’s all been done before, and much better, by programmes such as The Day Today, and the Fast Show, programmes which managed to combine biting satire with prophetic vision of the way consumerist / pop / contemporary life was / is going. Here it all seemed a bit lame, and despite all the busy busyness, rather dull. People all around me were stifling yawns, or taking sharp irritable intakes of nasally breath.
Further more, the staging removed any effectiveness in the text – lines were barked in a single, flat register, devoid of emotion or variation, reducing it (and the text itself does this at stages too) to just a list of random words.
The text itself seemed all a bit clever clever to me – as characters discussed the meaning of experimental art, all viewpoints were presented to try and head off and delegitimise any audience viewpoint – you think this is pretentious – well we’ve already admitted to that possibility and shown the counter-arguments so that’s your simplistic reaction undermined! What the text fails to recognise was the possibility that an audience might find it all, well, a bit tedious.
So what is it about? The difficulty of art, mostly, how elusive it is to try and portray a realistic psychology of a character, how any characterisation is necessarily artificial, unsatisfactory, simplistic, and dependent on artificial plot mechanics. In part because of the limitations of the tools of art, in part because an individual’s personality is a fragmentary, contradictory, ever changing entity.
The text’s solution is to produce fragmented discourses by multiple narrators – we may be seeing a dozen short dialogues about various women called Anne, or it may be a that these are aspects of the same person. The “Attempts” are those of the artist to capture the Annes, and also refers to several of the Annes attempts to commit suicide.
Fair enough, but I think you’ll find the The Wonderful World of Dissocia dealt with these matters in a much more satisfactory way. And I find myself keeping going back to what that play’s author, Anthony Neilson, said in the playtext (isn’t that a kind of bra?) about experimental theatre: “the danger is that work of this type can easily become impenetrable. I will never believe its right to send an audience out feeling confused and stupid. It’s a needless failure of communication…”
I also found myself thinking back to Alan Bennett’s “talking heads”, a master class in how a character can speak about one thing whilst revealing more and more about themselves, warts, contradictions and all.
Before the play, I went to see an exhibition of work by Philippe Parreno at the lovely Haunch of Venison gallery off Bond Street. Entitled “What do you believe your eyes or my words” the centrepiece was a video piece of an antique automaton writing out the title of the show. The doll’s hand shook, its eyes moved in macabre fashion. The sounds of the gears churning and clicking filled the space. I loved it, but mainly because of my interest in the sinister world of automata. Other pieces were a little flat: four flickering pencil drawings, each one tenth of a stop start animation piece – the drawings are changed each day, so it is very slow animation; a room filled with black helium balloons in the shape of speech bubbles; a picture of the artist giving a lecture to some penguins. The gallery blurb was interesting – “in a series of open-ended propositions, he challenges the viewer to interrogate all that is placed before them”. ‘Scuse me, I tend to interrogate all that is placed before me anyway, and much that is not. “The artist is sceptical of constructed narratives with their claim to authoritative experience, preferring to deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, and to entertain a panoply of perspectives, each as unreliable as the next.” Really? Well Mr Perrano, there’s this play you might want to go see…
Parreno's balloons
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