It's all me, me, me these days...

Well, it's been a rather breathless few weeks. Let's do a bit of a round-up shall we...

First and foremost, the show I was directing at The Arches in Glasgow came and went.

The show itself went well, I think. It was an interesting experience coming back to directing a piece of new writing after a year spent fizzing around the countryside for our site-specific project - plotting routes, co-ordinating volunteers, writings scripts, cobbling together a story. There is something immensely satisfying about the experience though.

When I was 11 or 12 I, like so many boys of my age/generation, worshipped at the alter of Games Workshop, a sort-of strategy game based in dizzyingly dense universe of magical armies, valiant heroes, and the kind of utterly earnest, and staggeringly epic narratives that Homer/Tolkien would have been proud of. The thing that really made this particularly gaming world (the only which I was ever a part of) truly captivating though was that to create your own unique army, you would buy the characters you wanted/needed (depending on how my parents/I looked at the matter) and paint them yourself.

This was undoubtedly my favourite part. I would spend hours labouring over each inch-and-a-half high figure, starting with the undercoat, choosing the main colour scheme, picking out highlights, detail, adding symbols, transfers, covering the little stand on which the character stood with grass and the occasionally decorative rock (or, severed arm depending on just how evil said character was meant to be) - the whole thing was a joy that I spent far, far too many days of my childhood on (days that could have been better spent learning that once you hit 13, an ability to paint small metal representations of wood elves well does not impress girls or boys).

I think that its this very same precise, meticulous joy that I take in directing a show. This is especially true when it's one written by someone else. You already have a shape, a figure, same as anyone else who was given that play. The joy comes from bringing that to life - colouring it, adding your own flourishes, completing it - turning it into something utterly unique, a beautiful, polished, discrete entity in its own right. This is how I go about creating a show. And although directing in this way is never going to truly excite me in the same way as some of the other projects I've done/am planning, there is an undoubted sense of childish contentment that comes from the whole process.

And as for the show itself. Well take your pick: Our internet friends at View from the Stalls were staggeringly generous:

Although it didn't quite have that magical spine tingling or jaw dropping moment of "Black Watch", "Lysistrata" or "The Recovery Position", "Your Ex Lover Is Dead" is right up there as one of the most enjoyable productions I've seen this year.

Joyce MacMillan in The Scotsman, less so:

A predictable collage of ideas from every recent date-movie about the fact that relationships - shock, horror - don't always last, the show is presented as a mock film experience, with great theatrical invention and skill.

Well, I liked the last part. Though she does go on to call us Talent Wasted, which I suppose is better than no talent at all.

Also I must at this point mention The Arches, for those who have never been there. It is a gorgeous, labyrinthine arts centre, nestled in the centre of Glasgow, under the citie's railway arches. During the festival in particular its a thrilling hub of activity, shows, club nights and music gigs filling the dark, cavernously atmospheric brick arches that make up the space. What I particularly love, going back to my earlier post on theatre buildings, is that they have made no attempt to transform the space into a Theatre. Concrete floors below you, great brick arches and air-conditioning units glinting metallic silver overhead - it feels real, industrial, mysterious and exciting. It also feels not like a (heavily subsidised) resource or a (utterly worthy) gift to Glasgow, but a part of the city, the events and the work there connected to the city in a very real, physical way.

Fortunately for us, Jackie, who programs theatre for them, was more on Statler than Joyce's side of the fence on our show and would love us to go back in some capacity - and the idea of creating a show specifically for that space is one that I am absolutely relishing.

[On the subject of which, for anyone who might be interested, it looks like very soon I might be developing Exposures with a similarly exciting theatre dahn Sarf. Will tell you more when I know more...]

So Thursday night I left The Arches and headed straight for the overnight megabus to get back to London to go back to work Friday morning. (glamour, darlings, oh the glamour of the theatre). The coach was appropriately crowded, hot and uncomfortable and made bearable only by the fact that I had finally treated myself to a copy of From Hell, to pass the journey. Now I am not a regular graphic novel/comic book reader but Alan Moore is, frankly, a genius and as with anyone who is truly great in their field, regardless of whether you know anything about what he does who will undoubtedly enjoy it. From Hell, unlike the diabolical, cardboard-setted, Johnny-Depp-Starring Cock-a-ney catastrophe that was the film version, is a rich, thoughtful and utterly compelling look not just at the Whitechappel Murders, but at late Victorian society as a brutal incubator for the 20th century. Go buy it.

Now with a link that Jeremy Paxman would be proud of, Alan Moore also wrote V for Vendetta about a future (though I think the 'future' date that he used was about 1997) fascist government ruling great britain. Which leads nicely into this:

Thousands of demonstrators planning to march on Parliament to call for the withdrawal of troops from Afrghanistan [sic] and Iraq have been told that their protest has been banned.

The Metropolitan Police told organisers of the Stop the War Coalition that no march would now be allowed “within one mile of Parliament” while MPs were in session.

Now forgive me if I'm wrong but surely its parliamentarians that are being protested against here. Hence to be most effective is it not required for them to be in session. Why should MPs be protected from loud bellows of disaproval at their actions more than anybody else should? Or has sitting and jeering at the opposition in parliament suddenly become an activity that can only be carried out to quite whistle of birdsong and the occasional click of a tourist's camera.

The exclusion zone is another of of those pieces of our recent history that stagger me every time I think about it. As David Rees said, "Hello, history? Umm... you are judging these people right?"

Your Ex-Lover is Dead

A message for all you folks North of the Border, (or adventurous travellers).

I am directing a delightful little play at The Arches Live festival in Glasgow Wednesday and Thursday this week.



The latest in a much under-represented market of plays with titles from melancholy Canadian Indie songs, Your Ex-Lover is Dead is a playful but (hopefully) touching show about trying (and invariably failing) to make up for lost time. It's written by a good friend of mine, a wonderfully talented young Canadian writer called Deborah Pearson.

If you're free (and, of course, actually in Scotland) it would be great to see you - I might even buy you a drink in The Arches' swanky bar. Do drop me an email to andy[dot]t[dot]field[at]gmail[dot]com if you want any more details.

A Little Bit Serious for a minute

From Amnesty's website:

Amnesty International deplores acts of terrorism and acknowledges the right of governments to protect their citizens when they face such hostile challenges and threats. We all value our safety and that of our loved ones after all.

For too long the 'war on terror' has been used to justify acts of torture, 'rendition', discrimination and unlawful detention. Amnesty acknowledges that the perpetrators of terrorism must be brought to justice but believes this should be achieved without eroding the very values we are fighting to defend.

Governments, including the UK's, have manipulated public fears, exploiting them to excuse actions that under normal circumstances would never be thought of as acceptable.

Actions that include the rendition and detention of terror suspects without adequate legal representation or fair trial in prisons like Guantanamo Bay. Prisons where guards are ordered to use torture to break the will of detainees in order to obtain information.

The rule of international law and the protection offered by fundamental human rights mechanisms is being seriously violated. Governments assume you support such actions in the ‘war on terror’ but the truth is you’ve never been given a choice.

Until now.

This is your chance to voice your concern and join a movement of people who feel the same way. A movement that believes everybody deserves basic human rights no matter what their beliefs or what they are alleged to have done. A movement that feels accepting such immoral, illegal, even barbaric actions, undermines the society they live and believe in.

This is your chance to Unsubscribe if you haven't done so already or invite everyone you know to join you if you have...

After the second world war, in the aftermath of the shock (in most cases genuine, in other cases feigned) of the discovery of the extent of the Nazi atrocties, the American Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to determine the extent to which people's human decency is curtailed by obedience. (n.b. I had a psychology tutor at one point who suggested that the ostensible goal of the experiment was to prove that atrocities on the scale committed in Europe could never have happened in The Land of the Free as, it was theorised, German's were more inclined to obedience than Americans).

In the experiment (which I imagine most of you are already familiar with) applicants (told they were taking part in a teaching experiment) were placed into pairs with a stooge (who they believed was another participant). The participant was then 'randomly' assigned the role of teacher and the stooge that of student. The participant would see the stooge being strapped into an electro shock machine. They were then taken to another room with a large machine for delivering electric shocks. They could hear (but not see) the stooge. For each question he answered incorrectly they were instructed to shock him.

As the incorrect answers increased so did the strength of the shocks. After a while the 'stooge' (actually a pre-recorded tape) was heard to moan out in pain, beg the participant to stop, to complain that he had a heart condition, and then, eventually to fall silent.

65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock. Many continued to administer the 450 shock long after the victim had fallen silent. Further, as Philip Zimbardo identified, None of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave.

I am pretty staggered when I recall how much has been done (and then tacitly accepted) in the name of fighting spurious notions over the course of the last half a decade. But I am more terrified by the fact that the rest of the time I forget.

Joined Up Thinking

Dear Reader,

In a rather foolhardy attempt at what I think I once heard called joined-up thinking (but in all likeliness is going to end up more closely resembling a bunch of separate ideas barely held together by a rather scraggy piece of thinkstring) I'm going to try and pull together some ideas from previous posts into a giant theoretical quilt, to keep you warm as the first winter winds begin whistling through streets still waiting for Summer to arrive.

A Disappearing Number, Complicite's recent maths-themed orgy of digital-projections at the Barbican, has caused a fascinating rift between the main-stream media's lavish praise (in The Guardian's review of the reviews the show received 8 across the board apart from one rather sheepish 4 out of 10 from, I think, The Sunday Times) and a decidedly colder and noticeably more underwhelmed reception here in the Mean Streets of the Internet. Compere and contrast:

All these ideas are realised with Complicite's customary elan by the nine-strong company and Michael Levine's design. A spinning screen whisks us from Chennai to Cambridge. A white-sheeted bed turns into an evocation of Greenland glimpsed from an airplane window [...] Even maths duffers will respond warmly to a show that confirms theatre's ability to make the sciences manifest. (**** Michael Billington, The Guardian)

The piece seemed to quickly resolve itself into what was effectively a cavalcade of scene changes. It felt as if hardly any scene really had a chance to really get going before it was cut off. As a result, our relationship to the characters felt continually on hold, deferred. Ultimately it was this distance that really finished me off. (Andrew Haydon)

Something is always happening, thanks to projections and mime which mean that the world bustles and races across our sightlines: Madras streets, trains, planes, Cambridge quads and high tables, even a Greenland iceberg that suddenly becomes a bed. It’s bravura stuff, perhaps sometimes overdecorative, yet also more than that. (**** Benedict Nightingale, The Times)

Sitting in the middle rows of the stalls I have rarely felt so distant from the performers in front of me, they seemed no more real than the images of Bombay or Cambridge flickering on the screens behind them. I certainly marvelled at this staggering televisual universe, enjoyed its careful teasing apart and soldering together of ideas and histories and stories, but undoubtedly, I never felt a part of it. (Umm... me - is this bad form - quoting oneself?)

Complicite's artistic director Simon McBurney has once again come up with a thrilling and beguiling show that combines high-tech stage effects with enormous heart, whisking the audience from Cambridge during the Great War to present-day India with the help of video film and an evocative score by Nitin Sawhney. (**** Charles Spencer The Telegraph)

We went with high hopes and it’s had some great reviews, but after a strong start it quickly descends into a tableaux, intercut with banal ITV drama about 40 somethings having a miscarriage. The only fully realised character is the Indian lady at the other end of the phone in a Bangalore call centre. Never mind the maths, clearly it was all a bit too hard trying to understand the enigmatic mathematician they claim is the heart of their story, so he pretty much never says anything! (The West End Whingers)

So what does this tell us? Well according to Michael Billington it should show us the 'Independence of mind' that professional theatre critics live or die by. Go back and read those again, you'll see what he means.

Much as I hate to disagree with Mr Billington (as you all well know), I believe there's more to this rift than the fact that he and his colleagues are a good deal more focused, and well-written than the likes of us scruff (as if the only reason we had anything bad to say was that we all just kept on writing until something negative came out, like shaking out the flaky fragments at the bottom of a cereal packet).

For a start it may have something to do with the fact that the A-string critics were among the 10% of people who were able to have a decent seat in the cavernous, obstacle-littered monstrosity that is the Barbican's main auditorium and that we, minor critics and paying members of the public, found ourselves not so meticulously catered for. Maybe, after all, this is the real reason for professional theatre criticism - to inform the rest of the audience exactly what is going on in the parts of the stage we can't see from where we're sitting.

And yet there is still something more to this - a growing, nagging dissatisfaction that doesn't seem to have quite reached the ivory-lacquered stall seats occupied by those wot write properly and don't waste their evenings with 'informal letters' on the subject of theatre.

In my review I mentioned a quotation from academic Victor Turner:

To look at itself a society must cut out a piece of itself for inspection. To do this it must set up a frame within which images and symbols of what has been sectioned off can be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need be, remodelled and rearranged.

Now, I used to see this as an almost definitive definition of Theatre, covering everything from the trivial and diverting to the King Lear's and Waiting for Godot's of this world. More recently, however, I'm not sure. There's something about its terms, like those with which the major critics lavished praise on Complicite's show (and indeed, like the show itself), that seems, fundamentally, outdated.

The problem for me is that Turner goes back to that metaphor of theatre being like a painting. Theatre happens within a frame. Within this frame there is nothing real - merely images and symbols of the real world, constructed within the safe and neutral space of the theatre stage.

'I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all you need for an act of theatre to be engaged.' I believe someone said once, rather famously, in another quotation that has been taken up as some kind of First Principal of theatre.

Except that (and for those who have been paying attention this is where the joined-up bit comes in), as I recently stated, there is no such thing as an Empty space. The comfortable boundaries that we put up between the real world and the world of the theatre (the edges of the empty space, the applause the bowing that assures us that all the Theatre is out of the way and done with) only serve to create the illusion that there is some empty space, some blank canvas, some neutral 100 square feet of stage in which the real world is converted into symbols and metaphors for us (or specifically for the All Powerful writer or director) to play with.

Reality does not cease to exist at the edges of the empty stage. An example of this came up recently in a piece by Alex Ferguson on Told by an Idiot's Casanova at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, a show in which (as you may have noticed from the nudgenudgewinkwink flyers designed entirely it seems to send a shiver through the kind of theatre going middle-class gentleman who scorns Sun and Zoo Magazine readers while being happy to sit through endless BBC montages of slow-mo close-ups female tennis players arses) history's greatest lover is played by a woman. In an article in the Guardian the company admit that a lot of the sex scenes in the show were edited out as, regardless of the position adopted, they still made Hayley Carmichael (playing Casanova), look like a Victim. In response to this Ferguson asks some very interesting questions.

All of this makes it seem like the stage is an aggressively male gendered space, and maybe it is. Of course, in the real world we can't fix the effects of several thousand years of patriarchy in an instant, but the theatre isn't the real world - in's much better than that, and in the theatre space we can do whatever we damn well please. But in the theatre nothing is easy. Is it a theatrical problem or a broader cultural one which also manifests itself in the theatre? Are the structures of power inscibed into the theatres themselves or is it that they are etched into the psyches of audience and actor alike?

In answer to Ferguson's last question what I would suggest it is undoubtedly the latter, that this demonstrates real-world values washing over the edge of the stage and colouring everything that happens on it.

After all, if in your publicity material you specifically play upon the longing male gaze and the objectified female (if it had been a production with a male Casanova would we have had a picture of arse on the flyers? No, probably a picture of his head smirking to camera, in on the joke) and you probably also have that image on the programmes handed to people as they enter the auditorium, how can you not expect the whole history of the male invention of woman as sex object (from restoration comedy, through Marilyn Monroe and back again) to cause the people watching (and the people acting) to feel as though the woman having sex on stage simply couldn't be in control.

We need new models for theatre, and new definitions. The most interesting theatre happening today does not rely on the notion that it is playing with symbols and images in a closed-off space of theatre. It has a far more immediate, far less controlling relationship with it's environment.

This can happen through the direct relationship between a performer and her audience, or in the strange relationship between a performance and the world it describes.

It can also happen by discarding the stage all together - by moving from a model of theatre that happens in an enclosed space to a model that sees theatre as draped over the real world like a vale or a ghost. Interestingly, there are some fascinating examples of this type of theatre appearing later this year in same programme as A Disappearing Number. For example, Blast Theory's Rider Spoke will see audiences cycling around the barbican in what is part treasure hunt, part interactive game, part theatre, using the architecture of the city as its set.

And on the other side of town the Soho are launching what is by far the most fascinating thing I have seen them attempt - engaging with the location of the theatre (and the relationship that the local community has with it), Moonwalking in Chinatown will take audiences on a walk through the streets of Chinatown, meeting along the way local performers and professional actors in a way that sounds fascinatingly similar to our project in Kent though with an entirely different (and possibly vastly more interesting and significant) subject matter.

This for me is the kind of theatre that today feels valuable, fascinating and important. A theatre engaging with its location rather than cutting itself off from it. A theatre plays with the real world rather than with symbols and metaphors. After all, as Tim Etchells (of forced Entertainment) once said, 'Sometimes it seems as if all we have to do is gesture to the window and ask people to look.'

A Disappearing Number at the Barbican

As the lights begin to dim we find ourselves in a lecture theatre. A young maths professor, nervously scratching her arm, begins to write numbers on a large white board. Sequences. 1 2 3 4 5. And then series. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5. She explains her workings as she goes, in the slightly rushed yet pleasantly jovial tone of someone explaining something completely obvious to a room full of people for whom she is aware it is not so. We stay with her however, for a little while at least, following her logic, understanding her workings. But then quickly the logic outpaces us; numbers become letters, letters become symbols. Soon she her lecture is soaring over our heads and disappearing off into another reality. A world of Maths (capital M); a place of logic and ideas that the audience, delightedly chuckling at their incomprehensibility, simply cannot penetrate.

And just as this moment passes, another actor enters, introducing himself to us as an actor; a performer in this play. None of this, he assures us is real. He takes the glasses from the professor and shows us they have no lenses. He slides the edges of the lecture theatre set off into the wings. Then suddenly, with barely anything actually happening other than his accent changing, he too leaves us. Launching himself off, into the world of Theatre (capital T), he is now a physics professor, in a taxi in India; the sound of traffic erupts across the auditorium and suddenly a projection of a busy Indian street fills the space where the white board was just a second ago.

It is with these beautifully paralleled moments that A Disappearing Number begins. Moments of take-off that play with the gap between everyday life and a space of ideas and imagination. Inviting us to see other worlds in the process of being made.

This show is, as I'm sure most of you know, the latest from Simon McBurney’s hugely acclaimed company Complicite. Much like their earlier piece, Mneumonic (for which, in form at least, this could practically be a sequel), the show elegantly balances complicated ideas, famous historical moments, and more intimate narratives.

We are told the story of Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and his friendship with the Cambridge professor Godfrey Hardy over the first few decades of the 20th Century. Yet at the same time, we also see a modern-day maths lecturer, obsessed with Ramanujan, and her relationship with an American hedge fund manager and second-generation Indian who has never returned to his parents’ original home. Between these two stories float numerous other characters, beautifully realised by the incredibly talented cast; a Indian physicist delivering a lecture on String Theory, a student, working as a maid at a Ramada Inn near Heathrow, an Indian lady working in a BT call centre in Mumbai.

To realise these disparate narratives and places, the show commands the full extent of the Barbican’s expansive stage. Behind the traditional lecture theatre ‘set’ are numerous opaque divides that move ceaselessly, rising and falling, sliding aside and rotating. Onto these divides are projected an unending series of videos and images, some conjuring whole cities, others simply forming a window or quietly shadowing the actions of the characters on stage. As the screens silently shift and the images on them appear and dissolve, they create an impossible (almost indeed, infinite) depth.

We move seamlessly between India and Cambridge, in a moment a study melts into an airport or a bedroom or a river. At its most staggering moments, the stage is all these places at once, the small company of actors darting unendingly through this geographical maze; dancing, talking, moving props and scenery and playing countless extras.

The anthropologist Victor Turner once stated that theatre is a way in which society can cut out a piece of itself for inspection. This show in many seems an attempt at the complete opposite. The fluid space of the stage, in its very instability and ambiguity, becomes a gap in reality; an empty space that works like a black hole, sucking everything from the real world into it – war, history, maths, immigration, commerce, globalisation, death, love. This is a play about everything.

More specifically this is a play about a different way of looking at everything – a mathematical way of looking at everything. The play seems to see the history of the world as one huge impossible series, summing to infinity. In the empty space of the stage, away from reality (on the other side of the equals sign) Complicite go about creating that infinity. A space in which everything is connected. Everything is joined in a series of elegant patterns. Characters from different times mirror each other’s movements, a woman trying on her shoes becomes an example in a lecture taking place a year and several hundred miles away, three entirely separate deaths in three different times and places are collapsed together into one single act of passing.

What sets the company apart is the effortless beauty with which they fold these disparate worlds into each other. Time is no longer linear, is not even fragmented or disrupted, but is stirred through the space like milk in tea. And to the subtle soundtrack of Nitin Sawhney’s music, this has an almost spiritual resonance; there is in fact a telling reference to the importance in Hinduism of this form of cyclical, interconnectedness. Indeed, A Disappearing Number, like its central figure Ramanujan, undermines the opposition of a logical (and typically Western) mathematics and an illogical (Eastern) spirituality; demonstrating the two (like everything else) to be innately connected in their explorations of the infinite.

And yet. There is something missing in all of this. Undoubtedly, the show exploits beautifully the conceit of the stage, as an Empty Space, becoming an indefinable, infinite reality unto itself. A world of limitless (im)possibility. And yet, the audience always remain very much back in reality – on the other side of the equation, looking in. And this has very little to do with the nonetheless sterile and cavernous Barbican auditorium, along with the Shaw Theatre possibly the worst theatre space in London.

What this comes down to is a matter of liveness, an issue that has already been discussed at length by Chris, Andrew and myself. The actors are entirely dislocated from the audience. Their voices come to us through microphones; when we hear the words they say, they are in essence, already second-hand, already recorded. Similarly the actors must move in time to the sound and video recordings projected all around them. They are no longer live beings, performing and reacting to a given audience on a given night. They are cogs in a vast and beautifully realised digital spectacle. Sitting in the middle rows of the stalls I have rarely felt so distant from the performers in front of me, they seemed no more real than the images of Bombay or Cambridge flickering on the screens behind them. I certainly marvelled at this staggering televisual universe, enjoyed its careful teasing apart and soldering together of ideas and histories and stories, but undoubtedly, I never felt a part of it.

Reading the programme before the show I noticed both that the company are now completing work on a screenplay and that the Barbican Cinema is showing a series of recordings of their earlier shows. It certainly felt from this show, as beautifully conceived and realised as it was, that this is the direction in which the company is moving – away from the visceral liveness of theatre, towards a different kind of spectacle.

Way Out West

From the murky backstreets of the Internet (which in my mind resembles a cross between the British Library and Soho on an overcast Thursday), to the bright lights and late nights of Hollywood where everyone (particularly feature-writers adept in the age old journalistic skill of bandwagon-jumping) is getting excited about The Big Story of 2007 - the Western Renaissance.

Yes, miraculously that most long-buried of genres is up and about, hanging around in the studio bar downing revitalising cocktails of stubble, dirt and melancholy machismo. Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson are presently breezing through the local multiplex in Seraphim Falls stalked relentlessly by Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in 3.10 to Yuma, meanwhile in another dusty corner The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has just won Brad Pitt the best actor award at the Venice Film festival. All of which should reasonably be greeted with the kind of almighty shrug reserved for any of the American film industry's pre-pubescent fads, except that this one particularly interests me.

The first reason for this being that the trend is predated by the most recent directorial offering of that doyen of the Avant-Garde (and as long-time readers will know, my own personal cinematic hero) Kevin Costner - Open Range, a majestically epic piece of unabashedly old fashioned Hollywood cinema, starring Robert Duvall and the aforementioned sad-eyed former-megastar as free-range cattlemen victimised by Michael Gambon's bullish Irish landowner, came out in 2003. Magnificent stuff.

And certainly, Costner is an interesting figure to raise his mulletted head at this point, wedging himself as he does, between two genres that have defined Hollywood cinema. For as the Western was breathing its last in the late 70s, George Lucas was transforming cinema with Star Wars, to the point that in 1980, as the multi-million dollar catastrophe of Heaven's Gate utterly killed off the Wild West as anything other than a stage show at the Disney Theme Parks, The Empire Strikes Back was the biggest selling movie of the year. Science-fiction had undoubtedly reached the top of the Hollywood pile and with the Alien, Star Trek and later the Terminator franchises (along with Blade Runner et. al) it would stay there for the next couple of decades.

Now at this stage I'd like to try and get a little vague and political. For me the comparison of the two genres is an interesting one. Science Fiction is a genre rooted in the fundamentally leftist utopias/dystopias of everyone from William Morris to Phillip K Dick, an inheritance that can be seen in both the dank, rainy corporatised world of Blade Runner and the liberal wet-dream on the control deck of Star Trek: The Next Generation's USS Enterprise (where all mankind is united and the advice of a compassionate emotion-sensing councillor is as important as that of the gung-ho 2nd in command).

The Western, however, is a very different beast. Although any attempt to glean a consistent theme or ideology from such a mammoth genre would be problematic, there are at least reoccurring tropes - the lone hero taking law into his own hands, a nostalgic longing for a lost world of freedom and independance etc - that might suggest a fundamentally more conservative leaning (exemplified in its favourite leading men - John Wayne and James Stewart).

Now perhaps it could be argued that the transition from the Western to Science Fiction plays a part in the imagined 'liberalisation' of Hollywood (where the ever-more earnest (and, it must be said, honourable) pursuits of George Cloony, Susan Sarandon et. al. are par for the course). Though I imagine we can juggle chickens and eggs on how the relationship actually works all day long.

Now it is in the light of this that we can (and you might need to run with me on this one which, if you have bothered reading this far, you're probably already doing) read Kevin Costner's much-maligned, 3-hour long, Tom Petty-starring, Shakespeare-quoting calamity The Postman as more interesting than simply a grandiose piece of self-indulgent nonsense that it admittedly probably still is. Because what it could be argued that Costner, self-confessed 'old' conservative that he is, is doing is creating what amounts to a sci-fi Western - a wolf in sheep's clothing (or visa-versa depending on your politics) - in which his lone hero sets out across a lawless (future) wasteland, uniting disparate communities through faith in a great American institution.

There is however more to this than a very long-winded and brave if misguided apology for Kevin Costner's The Postman. I guess I'm trying to ask a few leading questions about what the return of the Western really means? Especially in an age when people are simulteanously mourning the death of the blockbusting Sci-Fi film.

The rerise of the Western isn't the consequence of one successful genre movie (such as with Gladiator or Pirates of the Caribbean) and it appears to be slightly more than the Hollywood rule that all half-baked film ideas come in pairs (Ants and A Bugs Life, Volcano and Dante's Peak, or most recently The Illusionist and The Prestige). Perhaps it could be argued that it represents the resurgence of a stream of traditional American conservatism that has been somewhat suffocated by the rise and rise (and finally it would seem the fall) of the neo-cons. That there's a longing for a republicanism not tarred by the deaths of American soldiers and and an frankly shameless series of political lies and blunders (both personified by the frankly ridiculous figure of Alberto Gonzales) that finds its cinematic realisation in the melancholy nostalgia of the Western. Either that or this generation of Hollywood's leading men just want a chance to look good in chaps.

I Think Ringo Starr put it best when he said...

Just noticed that I have been criminally lax in updating the coterie of fellow bloggers I have rather tweely called 'The Little People' and so thought it best I use a whole post to draw your attention to the additions as recompense. Though, as Ian Shuttleworth has sortofkindof identified in the comments section of Chris Goode's post (more on this I half-promise, in a later post once my eyes have sunk even further down towards my navel) this theatrical corner of the internet being the giant no-name-tags-necessary electronic thought-orgy it is, you probably know these people already or, in fact, actually are them, so really this is more a means of apology than any concerted attempt to engage the theoretical (and frequently slipping unnoticed into fictional) unaffiliated reader.

Amongst them is Andrew Haydon - wordsmith, trendsetter and bastion of good taste that he is. Andrew's been on somewhat of a hot streak of late, vomiting eloquent well-thought out commentary like the internet was going out of fashion. His piece on critical distance is particularly worth your while, thinking his way round the subject without recourse to the fairly crass but faintly endearing never-give-up-never-surrender polemicising that seems to have become my stock-in-trade.

However, Haydon quotes from Robert Hewison (who, wikipedia informs me is the author of Footlights!: A hundred years of Cambridge comedy - there's a factlet for you...) one those weighty nuggets of wisdom that sounds like it was carved from the rock of ages - Remember that the play is the subject of the review, not you. Balls to that, I say. The subject of the review is both, and the curious, undefinable relationship between the two. Theatre can send us to sleep, it can summon a breathless, euphoric exhilaration, it can seem to be nothing very much at all and yet keep us awake that night. It can remind us of something that once happened or a story we once read or a play we once saw. None of these things happen on stage. Thank god for 'foregrounded subjectivity' - what on earth would we be able to write without it.

And, as Haydon seems to be suggesting, perhaps the New Theatre Establishment (a silly term that nonetheless delightfully summons in my mind images of Ian Shuttleworth, Lyn Gardner and Mark Shenton in a V-formation sporting matching wrestling uniforms) and their admirable and frequently brilliant engagement with this marvellous medium we call The Internets are a reflection of a changing critical landscape in which informality, personality and (yes) subjectivity have a burgeoning significance.

The Messy Space

There are few anachronisms quite so pleasurable as a crumbling auditorium. The velveteen opulence, the gaudy grandeur masquerading as sophistication, the musty smell of wasted years and the gentle snores of a well dressed man napping in the darkness. Oh the Faded Glamour. There's nothing brings a song to my heart like it.

So you can imagine my response when I read that that Young Turk, that famed eviscerater of traditions, that reckless theatrical radical Michael Billington in his latest article advocates either doing them up or tearing them down altogether...

So what do we do about old theatres, not least those in London's West End, many of which are in a state of visible disrepair? I recently advocated that lottery money should provide the £250m the Theatres Trust says is needed to make the buildings safe and attractive.

No I say! Safety be damned, and as for attractiveness - there is no circle of hell low enough.

Billington seems to advocate an almost clinical formula for the ideal auditorium. A perfect, comfortable, unobtrusive space - a blank canvas to be painted on by assorted theatrical maestros. All of which suggests that the best theatre is produced (and presented) in some kind of vacuum. A neutral environment, a space that is entirely empty, or I suppose you might say, an empty space, in which every last detail is provided by the masterful creators.

For me however this simply isn't the case. I loathe the clinical neutrality of the Cottlesloe and the Young Vic, am bored to tears by the Soho and if I have to see one more show in either auditorium at the Trafalgar Studios I may well end it all. For me theatre is not like art at all, and the best theatre is not created on a blank canvas. Theatre is, if anything, a renaissance fresco, graffiti, or something somewhere in between. The best theatre is created in the friction between the art and reality, in that murky grey area between the imaginary and the all-too-real.

Theatres shouldn't be the ideal forum in which to display a work of art. In their decrepitude or their opulence or their damned inappropriateness, they should fight the imposition upon them, they should challenge the use that is being made of them. This is what makes the perfect theatre space for me as an audience member, being forced two hold two contradictory ideas, two inconceivable places (even universes) in my head at the same time - the musty auditorium or the crumbling town hall or the subterranean vault and the impossible theatrical world conjured by the piece.

This is also, I feel, what makes for an exciting, challenging creative environment. A space that is still very much part of the real world. A space that demands that you, as a theatre maker, acknowledge it, think about it, incorporate it in some way, even overcome it.

In their day the two most exciting venues in the city were The Royal Court and The Theatre Royal Stratford East - which also at that time happened to be two of the most run down, miserable, leaky auditorium in London. George Devine and Joan Littlewood both loathed their respective miserable relics and yet they proved the most fertile, exciting environments for young theatre makers in the whole of the city. Now of course this had as much to do with these two crumbling theatres being the only place these already talented artists were actually able to put on work, but I genuinely believe that the physical presence of these fading theatres made a significant contribution (both for the artists and the audience) to the power of the shows you could see there. John Arden (or it might have been Arnold Wesker) even famously wrote a play that deliberately incorporated the sound of the London underground that can be so frequently heard rumbling through the Royal Court.

Today however after years of Lottery money being plowed into renovating our theatres to the point of sterilisation, there are few places left that have such an uncomfortable presence. This (rather than some spurious notion of novelty or gimmickry) is perhaps why some of the most exciting young theatre makers in London have collected around the SHUNT vaults - because it offers them a space that confronts them, challenges them; a space that demands the audience acknowledge it while at the same time being transported somewhere else entirely.

And in an ideal world I hope that when the crumbling theatres of the West End finally become unusable for big budget musicals, rather than having lottery money strip them and sanitise them and make them over like some fading Hollywood star , maybe we'll fill them full theatre-makers instead, providing them with a new environment to explore, and a new (and very messy) space to make theatre in.

Goodbye, Berlins

Marcel Berlins used part of his Guardian column yesterday to bluster in fine drunk-uncle-uncle-at-Christmas-dinner style about all these damned plays "based on" films.

How dare they take a great work of art and mangle it into some other format, for which it was not designed and envisaged... I suspect the very words "based on", so often the precursor of a work that demeans the original.

Now without getting at all hyperbolic, for me this is exactly the kind of preciousness and reverence that is creatively retarding the whole of Western civilisation.

No work of art is wholly original, no work of art is created in a vacuum. Artist's must be given the freedom (afforded to everyone from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan) to beg, borrow and steal stories, melodies, memories, one-liners - in short anything they can get their grubby, underpaid hands on in their pursuit of greatness. This kind of instinctive dislike of anything "based on" anything else is as dangerous as the encroachment of the dark knights of copyright theft on the health and well-being of the artistic community. (at this stage I'd recommend you go and watch this fascinating 20 minute documentary on musical copyright and the 'Amen Loop' the world's most important 6-second drum loop)

If you like the original then treasure it, value it by all means, but understand that what follows is a new work of art in a new medium. Have the good sense to view it as a discrete entity. The original still exists for Christ's sake - Berlins talks as if they've made the Young Vic's version of All About My Mother from the dismembered remains of every print of Almodovar's original film.

But then, a couple of brandies with Christmas pudding later, Berlins is off again on a completely different (but equally bonkers) track:

Yet I don't object to plays made into films, of which there are thousands, many of them clearly better in their new guise. Nor do I have any problems with stage musical adaptations of movies. But film dramas turned into plays have, until recently, been uncommon. I wish they had remained so. It is a lazy way out for a theatre. It saves the trouble of commissioning new plays from playwrights... it's also a negation of what theatres are supposed to stand for. I get particularly annoyed when Britain's most eminent theatres - the National (public money) and Old Vic included - stoop to the practice. They, above all, should be dedicated to developing and performing original works by playwrights with their own ideas rather than resort to material from the movies.

And note before I get on to the rest, that rancid old chestnut being hurled in Nicholas Hytner's direction again - you, with all of your Public Funding, how dare you not do exactly what I think you ought to do?

The main problem, however, is that Berlins is labouring under (and seemingly being crushed by) the misapprehension that theatre stands for something. It does not. It is a vast, staggeringly wide and unfathomably deep ocean of conflicting ideas, artists, forms, styles and philosophies. It is not a production line for the development of New Playwrights. It is not a medium in which sole possession of ideas or creativity belongs to the guy with the pen in his hand.

Some of the most startling thoughtful and creative artists working today are not writers. Kneehigh's A Matter of Life and Death, 'based on' the Powell and Pressburger movie, being the best example Berlins could have come up with to prove my point - a fascinating, brave and thoughtful piece of theatre, bristling with more ideas and insight in its staging than a dozen tired new plays about polygamy or middle class dinner parties. The point being that the words written down on the page do not have to be the sole (or even the primary) source of ideas, argument and creativity within the theatre. As Lyn Gardner identifies, one of the most interesting and challenging pieces of theatre at the Edinburgh Festival this year, had almost no words at all.

And, besides, what Berlins also seems to have failed to notice is that 80-90% of the theatre churned out by the two institutions he mentions is not new writing at all but restaging of old plays, something which is, apparently, absolutely fine.

Exposures

Lyn Gardner has written a lovely article mentioning my show, Exposures, here:

Exposure was a brilliant and simple idea, giving participants a disposable camera and inviting them to go out into the city and take 24 exposures each on a different theme. Exposure One asked you to take a picture of the place you would go if you wanted to tell someone you loved them; exposure nine asked you to snap the future; while Exposure 16 asked you to find the place where you would start an uprising and Exposure 22 demanded you find someone you could fall in love with. The trick of the piece is that it can be done quite alone or in groups; it transforms the entire city into one vast film set and makes you engage and look at the city and the people on the streets with entirely new eyes.

As Lyn mentions I am hoping to go on and develop the show further, and rest assured you will be the first people to know if and when it happens.

Festival Round-up

Well the festival has now stumbled drunkenly into its second week. Hope, enthusiasm, fatigue, despair and nausea have all come and gone and its possibly time to (heaven forbid) to reflect a little.

For some this has been a festival of circus and spectacle, of bright lights, loud music and dazzlingly euphoric images. Still glowing from its rapturous reception at the Roundhouse earlier in the year, Fuerzabruta is undoubtedly the big show of the festival, if only in the number of wide eyed and over-enthusiastic flyerers it has lingering on every street corner, their t-shirts emblazoned with the show's trademark image. Elsewhere the polish company Biuro Podrozy have torn from Macbeth a grand night time spectacle of revving engines, flickering flames and dangling skulls. And at Assembly the Canadian company 7 fingers of the hand are selling out houses for what is essentially an astounding gymnastic display with a smattering of story.

These remarkable spectacles are invariably successful in Edinburgh. The festival is a sea of white noise, every pore of the city saturated with a kind of bubbly mindless excitement. Rushing from venue to venue there is little time or space to stop and think. The moment the clapping dies down the memory of the show is being drowned out by deadlines, timetables, flyerers and the incessant thronging of the crowds. In such a maelstrom it is understandable that the things that you remember are those that pick you up shake you, leaving you gasping in awe.

For me however, this festival has been about smaller, subtler, quieter shows. About absences, loss, ghosts and the simple art of storytelling.

Tim Crouch's latest show England is one such meticulous and devastating tale of absence. Billed by the traverse as a site-specific performance taking place in the Fruitmarket gallery, I entered (burdened by the baggage that term carries with it) with expectations of grand installations and rooms transformed. What I encountered was simply the gallery itself, bare white walls and slick laminate wood flooring. From out of the assembled throng two nondescript voices rose, thanking us for coming. As they spoke, sharing and swapping the lines of a monologue, somewhere in the air between them the outline of our anonymous narrator began to take shape; an absence, a character without a body, a ghost.

Like the spectral figure at the centre of Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, the character is a nameless, fractured urbanite. The beautiful elusive text carefully draws this blurry figure; a man or a woman, surviving heart failure in a high-brow London filled, like the gallery itself (a former fruitmarket now stripped of its history and its purpose), with art, empty symbols, referring to nothing but their own beauty.

In the second half, as we move downstairs into an even barer, emptier room, this devastating sense of loss and emptiness spills out of this insular London world, to the unnamed country in which our narrator's boyfriend has found him/her a replacement heart. Here it is the foreign husband and wife, the heart donor and his widow, who are the greatest absence; unseen, unheard except through the mouth of a translator, unwilling lifesavers for this western stranger. Their identity, their very lives, torn from them to fill a deep emptiness festering at the heart of our slick metropolitan existence.

Rotozaza's Etiquette is similarly an elusive, tantalising insight into metropolitan life. You arrive in a cafe and sit at a table opposite your partner, an assortment of props lined up on one side. A set of headphones buzz with the recorded sound of a cafe, similar to that in which you actually find yourself, and a voice calmly tells you what to do and say. Again, slowly, characters and a conversation form between the two of you. Somewhere in the space between the voice speaking to you and the words coming out of your friend's mouth a scene (almost like a mirage) shimmers and appears - a man and a woman, two strangers, sitting talking in a cafe in Paris.

But it is never as simple as this. You stare across at your friend, they are at once known and unknown, two separate people. At points the tapes you are both listening to diverge, while you continue to carry out actions together they now have different meanings, exist in different worlds - a balcony in the rain and a quiet walk up a hillside. This glorious, intricate kaleidoscope of identities and fractured conversations is punctuated by moments of real intimate beauty shared by the two of you. The kind of connections, the conversations late night with strangers in bars and cafes, that make it feel like the world is whirling ceaselessly around a bubble containing just the two of you. This is the feeling that Etiquette leaves you with. Of having shared something special, and just a little magical.

Another roster of disembodied voices and characters fill Chris Goode's marvellous Hippo World Guest Book. Taking 400 or so pages of conversation from a long-since abandoned Internet message board, Chris has carefully constructed a beautiful parable for, well, the whole of civilisation really. We begin with the creation -an introduction informs us that the page was created by a pleasant looking middle aged man from somewhere in the US called Ramon Valencia, to share his innocent fascination with and love of hippos. As the introduction goes on to tell us how a disillusioned Ramon abandoned the site about a year, Chris carefully builds a little shrine, a stuffed toy, a candle and a photo of this most beneficent of creators; yet another ghostly absence, leaving in his wake a fascinating petrie dish, teeming with modern life.

Slowly and painfully this little society begins to fall apart. In the shows most beautiful and absurd segment a single voice cries out to Ramon, his absent creator, beging and pleading him to answer. By the end even this desperate human voice has died off, leaving only blank spaces and automated spamming machines. And as the lights dim and the music soars, from one man reading from an Internet message board the image was conjured of a lonely barren future, peopled only by automated robots, picking through the last broken debris of civilisation. And its quite funny at points as well.

What these clever, beautiful little shows seem to share is a fascination with fractured, elusive characters; the shadows that we all become passing through the bright lights and the bustle of a big city. And they find ways of representing these characters, of exploring them, embracing them, telling stories about them, through three joyously inventive theatrical forms. And it is these forms that convey this sense of absence as much as their content. In each case you are left with the sense of people you've almost met; the neighbour's intimate conversation overheard in a cafe, the lonely looking girl on the underground, the anonymous note, carefully typed in an internet chatroom.

A New Show

For anyone who hasn't gorged themselves to Creosotean proportions on the Edinburgh Festival, I am doing a wafer-thin mint of a show for you to savour on Monday 20th. It's completely free and is likely to last up to 2 hours. I don't want to explain too much - suffice to say that you will walking around outside and that you will need to bring a camera. Please do come along - it would be delightful to meet you all in the flesh.

For more information please feel free to contact me at andy.t.field[at]gmail[dot]com.

Site Specific

"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene." Some French guy once said, and he was right.

700 years before anyone had ever been overcharged for their interval drinks at the Lyceum Theatre, groups of guildsmen paraded through the muddied streets of York, Wakefield and Chester. From the back of their wooden carts they performed plays that collapsed epic Christian folklore and mundane social reality beautifully into one another.

400 years before anyone had left Lord of the Rings feeling faintly disappointed, dozens of companies of actors travelled endlessly across the country, the purpose-built auditoriums of London being reserved for only a few exclusive companies.

Then 20 years ago some bright spark came up with the term site-specific theatre. And it caught on.

Site-specific theatre is a horrible Frankenstein term. An entirely made-up theatrical 'movement' stitched together from any number of diverse styles, forms, concepts and performances. Languishing in this verbal dungeon are Shakespeare plays performed in underground vaults, tours around the city of Sheffield in a bus and a series of sculptures in an abandoned hotel; in the last six months alone a warehouse remodelled to look like a town in the Deep South, a Jean Genet play in a hotel in Brighton and two men walking round the Barbican in a big spiral have been rounded up and dumped in this crowded chamber.

The problem is of course that in a 300 word review (or for that matter a 3 sentance press release) there isn't necessarily the space to effectively explain exactly where and exactly how a performance outside of a theatre occurred. Journalistic short-hand exists for a reason. Because it's shorter. Site-specific is an easy and quick way of explaining that a piece of theatre didn't involve an audience sitting down in a purpose-built auditorium and to move on to the far more pressing concern of whether it was any good or not.

The problem is that, like most short-hand, the term is at best so vague as to render it utterly useless. At worst it is a sinister way of pigeon holing anything not shackled to an auditorium as some kind of gimmicky minority pastime - a small, exciting and eminently controllable pocket of a larger theatre universe. An eccentric second-cousin whose tricks grow tired very quickly. Indeed, already at least one major critic has suggested that site-specific theatre has just become a treasure hunt for the most atmospheric location; a high-brow guided tour of the country's hidden secrets.

There is of course a lot invested in sustaining the attitude that auditoriums of all stripes are the home of true theatre. That they aren't (like playwriting in fact) merely one amongst many potential forms that has gained somewhat of a foothold in the public consciousness over the last 400 years. The people within an investment in this attitude are fundamentally the producing houses and drama schools and broadsheet reviewers that constitute what is unironically known as the theatre industry - the bastard love child of art and commerce.

The prefix site-specific allows people to maintain the notion that the resurgence of a myriad of theatrical forms that break with the conventions of the (predominantly Victorian) auditorium is merely another new-fangled and eminently bracketable subdivision of straight theatre. A gimmick that will no doubt pass, allowing them to get on with the important task of complaining about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the titanic.

I think I am suggesting that perhaps there is a little more going on. That perhaps we are seeing people beginning to rediscover theatre outside of the theatre industry. After all, the mystery plays were not, I believe, ever referred to in their day as site-specific community based promenade performances.

*Applause*

My post on our glorious day out in the country is now available to have a read of here for those who are interested.

For those who aren't... well, don't read it.

In other news, I keep finding myself in semi-aborted standing ovations. One person rises. And another. And another. I feel it coming. Rising up from the pit of my stomach and lifting me to my feet, clapping uproariously and shaking my head in sage admiration. And then it peters out. Should I stand with the tiny few? Does the show really deserve it or am I succumbing to the euphoria of the mob? These are anxious days. The answer is of course to stop watching really good shows. Either watching incredible ones, or the shatteringly mediocre. 5 stars to the first person who figures out which is more readily accessible in Edinburgh.

Aurora Nova Profiles: John Moran

John Moran should not be here alone. As the title suggests, his show is a duet between the composer and his partner and former neighbour Saori. However, as the lights dim there is only John, sitting cross-legged on the floor, all in black with a smart waistcoat and his hair neatly parted to one side. He informs us that Saori should have been here, should have been performing with him, dancing to his music. But in order to raise a little extra cash for their voyage to the festival she was working in a restaurant, and just before they were due to fly out she stepped in boiling oil, scolding her foot so badly that she was hospitalized and has had to stay at home. So here is John Moran, performing a duet, solo.

This is just one of the stories that John tells. There is the time that he and Jeff Buckley fought for the affection of a beautiful girl in a grand musical game of one-upmanship. There is the other time he lived in a secret garden for artists in the centre of Paris, and buried the mementos of a lost relationship under a famous statue in the city. Or the time he was a member of a Jungian cult who asked him to commit suicide. These stories filter through John’s music, filling the gaps and covering the entire performance with a soft veneer of mysticism. They are marvellous stories. Beautifully performed. Beautifully honest. Beautifully fantastical. But it is for his music that John Moran is known.

For a long time in New York John Moran was known for his grand theatrical spectacles. Huge operas in spaces like the Lincoln Centre. Shows with dozens of projectors, months of tech, with performers and artists including Allen Ginsberg, Uma Thurman and Iggy Pop. However, after a few years of incredible success these ever grander, ever more extravagant enterprises left John feeling, well, disenchanted. Until one day, sat on his porch in Brooklyn, he happened to see Saori walking gracefully down the steps of the neighbouring apartment block. He asked if she’d come to New York to dance. Quickly she was drafted in as a replacement dancer for a tour of John’s work. Since then he has made nothing but portraits of Saori.

Although in many ways these small intimate pieces are radically different to his former extravaganzas, allowing John the freedom to improvise and play off an audience in a way you simply can’t do when your show requires a dozen technicians, they are still fundamentally an extension of the same philosophy. John calls his music a study of naturalism, presented as music and choreography. He meticulously stitches together hundreds of samples to create the illusion of voices, characters, and environments; Charles Manson, A McDonalds or an assortment of sleazy characters in a grimy LA Bar. As one jaw-dropping scene in the Edinburgh show demonstrates, all of these seemingly naturalistic environments are built upon a delicate, precise musicality; rhythm, phrasing, tone, and pitch are all present in John’s work, they are simply in disguise.

In his performances with Saori, John takes this one stage further. He and Saori become characters in their own show, performing exaggerated versions of themselves. Their words and actions are carefully scored and choreographed, recorded on a track that they then lip-synch to for large chunks of the show. Thus the entire event becomes an illusion. Like the art of Tim Noble and Sue Webster the show first appears as a messy catastrophe, the precision of which slowly (and terrifyingly) dawns on the audience. For some, it is all too much. John has had nights when audiences have sat icy with disapproval. For those who go with it however , the slow revelation of the artistry behind these bizarre scenes takes your breath away.

And without Saori it is this relationship between John and the audience that has become the most fascinating element of his Edinburgh show. In his low-fi, late night slot he is free to experiment with the show, to play with the audience, to create, each night a truly unique experience. This freedom took on an added dimension in the last performance when John asked Silvia Mercurialli of Rotozaza, who he had met since arriving in Edinburgh, to perform one of his pieces with him in the show.

Silvia spent the day wandering round the venue in headphones trying to drill herself in the complex naturalistic moves that John’s pieces require; picking imaginary beers out of fridges, walking five paces to the other end of the room, turning to the left, all timed exactly to the voices of the score. According to both the evening was a lot of fun and from now on it is likely that she may be a regular part of John Moran’s fascinating late night Edinburgh universe.

John Moran and his Neighbour Saori is at Assembly Aurora Nova until August 27th, at 11pm. Tickets from the Aurora Nova box office.

Aurora Nova Profiles: Rotozaza

Throughout August I have been asked to write a series of profiles on the companies performing as part of Aurora Nova's 2007 Fringe Festival line-up, beginning with the English company Rotozaza.



Rotozaza was formed in the late 1990s by Silvia Mercurialli and Anthony Hampton, having first met at a rather uninspiring workshop in Italy.

In their earliest work they created a series of large, gloriously ambitious events in various parts of mainland Europe, where they had both trained. These early works were what might be called by some site-specific – a vague and comfortable term to bracket together anything that doesn’t occur in an auditorium. In Rotozaza’s work, audiences walked through landscapes, a graveyard or an abandoned school, encountering strange, beautiful, disturbing images.

After moving to London they continued to create unconventional pieces of theatre, frequently in collaboration with many other artists and companies. Despite their diversity and inventiveness these events were however still in some ways fundamentally theatrical, still relied on the discrete division between audience and the actor or environment they were encountering. As well-hidden as it was, scattered across the four corners of an underground vault and chewed up by disorientating installations, the remnants of the stage (on which any performing should be done) was still there.

This began to change almost by necessity when Ant decided that he wanted to do a show with a friend of his who was not by profession a performer. In order to get him on the stage he devised a show in which he would receive instructions as to what he should do. In this way he could be alleviated of responsibility for every action, every word, every gesture. In this way a hole was punctured in the wall between the stage and the auditorium. Suddenly you didn’t need to be an actor, or a pre-rehearsed part of the show, to become part of the performance. Quickly Ant and Silvia realised just how fascinating it would be to put other people in that same situation, to compare their responses to this a list of instructions, to see quite how they would perform.

In this way the emphasis in their work began to fundamental shift. A new seam of questions was opened up – about who should be performing and how (or how much); about whether this having to obey a list of instructions limits you or, divorced from responsibility, frees you up to be more yourself. In a series of shows, including Doublethink and Five in the Morning, the company explored the possibilities of this blurring of the line between audience and performer. Etiquette is in many ways the next logical step.

Two audience members arrive at a café, they sit at a table arrayed with a series of props, they each put on a set of headphones and they begin a conversation (loosely inspired this piece of Jean Luc Godard). Through their headphones they are told what to do and say. There are stories, dialogue, locations, a world is conjured as easily and beautifully as in any more traditional show. Yet it is a world that exists only for two people, or at times only for one, as the two sets of instructions splinter off into separate universes. Etiquette is, as its flyer suggests, a private experience.

Sat in a corner of a café two people perform for each other, and for themselves, their actions mirrored in those of the other people sitting around them, talking and drinking in the real world. To these other people watching the show is also fascinating, a curious naturalistic dance between two people; a delicately choreographed piece of everyday life.

Stripped of its performers and the idea of putting on a show for someone, Rotozaza see Etiquette almost as a gift; an experience offered to anyone. Indeed, the show can be packed away in a box and centre to any corner of the world.

Etiquette will not dazzle you with spectacle or the virtuosity of its creators. It is a more democratic experience; an open invitation, offering anybody the chance to complete the show. As one person who has written in the comments book supplied by the company has suggested ‘it is nice to have a more active role at the fringe.’ And this is precisely what makes it such a wonderful idea.

Etiquette is at Assembly Aurora Nova until 27th August, every 30 minutes from 11.00 to 23.30. Tickets from the Aurora Nova box office.

Our big trip to the country.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed an interest in discovering a little more about how our spectacular escapade in the country went. At present, I am putting together a bit of a photo-record of the day, with some notes and such like, to give you a good sense of how the whole thing went. This will probably be ready by the end of the week but suffice to say for now, it was a wonderful day and thank you to everyone involved. And here's a little teaser...

(p.s. I see the excitement of the day has already gone to some people's heads. Actors, eh?)

The Edinburgh Festival

Well, the Edinburgh Festival is in full swing, colourful t-shirts and ugly posters litter the cobbled streets and the air heaves thickly with the heady scent of enthusiasm and disappointment. For those who have never experienced the sensual assault that is The Royal Mile during August, it is something to behold - a gauntlet of flyerers, street artists, tourists and tour guides and alchoholics. A marketing mardi-gras. All of the overcrowding and adolescent posturing of Oxford Street without any of the shops.

"Would you like a flyer?"

"No"

"Come see my show?"

"What is it?"

"Oh it's great"

"Take a flyer"

"What?"

"Come see the Laramie Project!"

... and on it goes. What is possibly most frustrating about all of this is the shuddering lack of originality to it all. Year after year companies come up, new companies, young companies "fresh, vital, original" (The Scotsman 5/8) companies and yet all they can muster to sell the piece of art that they have slaved over, that they have laboured and sweated and plundered their bank accounts to bring to the festival, are the same old tired gimmicks year after year.

A grizzled, shell-shocked veteran of numerous Edinburgh campaigns, I barely notice someone lying prone in the middle of the street covered in blood and surrounded by flyers; words written in foot high chalk letters scrawled on a street corner barely receive a glance, mimes are swatted away like so many late-summer flies; I no longer see costumes, only that fools inside them.

What I like, what I respect, admire, nay even, on a hazy afternoon spent wandering peacefully through the carnage, enjoy, is someone who will quietly, politely, gently offer me a flyer and exlain a little about their show. I don't want some clever line. I don't want some arse to tank by dressed as a chicken, followed by his inevitable entourage, carpet bombing anyone foolish enough to turn their heads and look with flyers for their no doubt hilarious Sketch Comedy troupe or their version of Intolerable Acts of Genocide: The Musical. I want to meet people. Nice People. Nice people who have something to say about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

A Theatre Festival is always a procarious balance, emphasis see-sawing between the first part of that name and the latter. As I sloshed through the rain at the Edinburgh Fringe Launch party, puddles forming around the corporate sponsored chicken stands and running in little streams down the well worn red carpet, it occurred to me for about the thousandth time that Edinburgh has undoubtedly tottered critically towards the latter at the expense of the former. Which is not to say that there aren't a great number of shows of a remarkably high standard. But where is the sense of unity, of dialogue or exchange, of artistic expression in the way they are presented?

Truth is, although some venues do their best to present a thoughtful, challening programme, as a whole the fringe is simply a gaudy, garbled, groggy, incoherent mess. Like the pitiable acts performing at the Fringe Launch Cabaret, companies, venues and performers all bellow for attention over the raised voices of the drinking, talking, laughing masses, who either can't or won't listen.