”There are many groups like this one, all over the country, all over the world, just waiting for the moment of transformation”
TRIPLE LOCK PLOT SPOILERS! Normally I stick up a plot spoiler notice just in case anyone might care. This time, spoil means spoil! If you’re going to see this show, which is on till 12th June, you really don’t want to read this review first!
Anyone else old enough to remember the old ’End of Part One’ sketch where the cinema patrons end up getting seats within the film itself? The performances of DreamThinkSpeak, which in their own words “interweave life performance with film and instillations to create extraordinary journeys” are something similar.
Rather than setting up fixed areas for stage and audience you wander round an environment, coming across actors and interacting with them, as if you’ve been dipped in their world. After ’Before I Sleep’ and ‘The Rest Is Silence’, this the third of their Festival performances I’ve seen.
The Pavilion estate (for non-locals, a large area in central Brighton) is presented as a town in itself, under the dominion of the Governess. But steps are afoot to remove her, with a group of revolutionary cells led by her own brother Lucas. Buying a ticket is enough to get you mixed up in all this.
The politics, it has to be be said, were typical of this type of thing. The system is a semi-feudal affair, focused on the Aunt Sally figure of the Governess, not a social and economic relation which requires changing. (Though the olde-worlde look of the Pavilion estate may have been a factor here.) Revolutionaries are well-meaning middle-class types, cops hard-working proles. And those revolutionaries are divided into big-hearted idealists and violent fanatics. They first denounce the Governess’ dinner debate as a farce, but then participate in it. In fact, there’s too much formal debating in general. Their plan seems to be to tell her she’s not wanted, at which point she’ll be obliged to leave. Good luck with that…
However, I’m not sure how much that matters. Because it wasn’t really what the thing was about. Playing up the immersive nature of the drama, the actors don’t broadly soliloquise but directly address us, look us in the eye. At various points, we’re appealed to by both cops and revolutionaries. And we’ve no notion who we can trust, or whose plans are even credible. So, bewildered, we follow the guides around like human baggage hoping some resolution is reached.
Which, pretty much, is the state we live our lives in. But, by standing so near the spotlight, we start to feel singed by it. And I’d have to say I know this feeling! You turn to radical political groups because you want to get unchained, but before you know it you’re tied in knots.
I kept thinking how much this miasma of mistrust felt like descriptions of pre-revolutionary Russia. Forgetting that the Festival programme had already confirmed this was based on Dostoyevsky’s ’The Possessed’, which is about… as you may have guessed… pre-revolutionary Russia. In its own words, “plunging [us] into the feverish and hallucinatory world of Dostoyevsky’s vision.” This isn’t agitprop, but absurdist tragi-comedy for us to get ourselves mired in.
And then there’s technology. I’ve not read Dostoyevsky’s book, but assume characters in it don’t lug tablets around, which dispense clues and instructions of doubtful provenance. And of course modern activist culture does organise on-line, for both better and worse, the smartphone replacing the Little Red Book.
The show starts several days early, when you’re sent an email containing a weblink to Lucas speechifying. Then ends with a room of screens, each devoted to a character (both activist and cop), all talking at once. Which becomes a kind of summation of the experience. Remember the William Burroughs phrase, “Ain’t nothing left here now but the recordings”? (And modern life as an indecipherable babble seems a theme of the company.)
Everyone has to have a kind of origin story which led to them getting involved in the underground. Its pretty much the first thing we’re told. This is something commonly done when activist culture gets represented in the media, as a kind of instant motive, despite it not being at all accurate of that world. But then something smarter is done with this…
One of the things you run past is a Jam exhibition currently on at the Pavilion. And it’s hard not to think of those famous lines: “What a catalyst you turned out to be, Loaded the guns then ran off home for your tea”. They prove apt, when Lucas takes the opportunity to bump off his dominating big sister. All those grand, fine-sounding political speeches, and it had been a simple case of sibling rivalry all along.
Crucially his motives are not despotic, to seize control from her, but narrow and entirely personalised. You could call them petty, insofar as that term could be applied to murder. On accomplishing this he immediately disappears from the narrative, his real work done.
Though, as you’re arbitrarily assigned different guides on arrival, your perspective might change accordingly. Ours was Stela Maris, presented as the idealistic heart of the group, who begs troubled head Lucas not to shoot. (When you hear them clashing, off-stage but audible, it’s not unlike being a child and hearing your parents argue.) But Lucas was guide to his own group, who might well have seen in him a more tragic figure, playing out a kind of Greek tragedy in which the rest of us were more incidental.
Similarly, while my group did some very English squirming and eye-averting when asked by both sides to join up, I wondered if others might become more engaged. Arifa Akbar’s Guardian review suggests her group did. While a review in GScene commented more sourly: “We listen to radicalised young people talk of lost childhoods and a system which crushes them, we look around and admire the baroque and rococo back rooms we find ourselves in. We stay silent.”
All of which is to the good. However…
The show is not short of incident, sometimes quite dramatically so. But incident is not necessarily the same thing as narrative. And the hectic rushing from one supposedly ‘safe’ place to another, then again, did feel at times like incident was trying to take the place of narrative.
And the use of technology did seem a little half-hearted. It mostly seemed additional, the tablets we were asked to carry just underlining things we were already seeing or being told by our guide. Had someone switched theirs off at the start, there’s little they’d have missed. Dramatically, there should have been more times when the tablets were guiding us, demanding our trust.
I wondered if this was out of concern that some more technofeared attendees might fail to follow along. But a suggestion at the initial briefing that we’d need to work together, moving as a group, might have allayed that. Perhaps a more extended period at the start, where the tablets try to guide you to your guide, with plans getting stymied at the last minute.
Overall… well, it’s a hard thing to get a grip on. If it often feels like a frustrating experience, that we pass through spaces without really engaging with anything – well, that’s kind of the point. It is, by a strict definition of the term, Absurdist. Things make no sense, then they’re over, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to deal with that. And that conflicts by definition with the standard dramatic needs, for closure and all of that. If you come away feeling dissatisfied and uninvolved, that’s kind of the point. What might feel like basic audience needs can just be at odds with the event.
But then again, other things have been Absurdist without this seeming so much of a problem. While it has much to commend it, you feel like it’s not *quite* there yet, it needs a little more road testing and fine-tuning. It couldn’t be claimed it equals their previous two festival offerings.
And finally (as they say on the news)… if this was more absurdist tragicomedy than political drama, there was still one clue which side the company might fall on. In the room of screens, both activists and cops supply a personal anecdote of how they came to be involved. And each activist has their own story while, like a troll farm, the cop tales are all identical…
Everyone has to have a kind of origin story which led to them getting involved in the underground. Its pretty much the first thing we’re told. This is something commonly done when activist culture gets represented in the media, as a kind of instant motive, despite it not being at all accurate of that world. But then something smarter is done with this…
One of the things you run past is a Jam exhibition currently on at the Pavilion. And it’s hard not to think of those famous lines: “What a catalyst you turned out to be, Loaded the guns then ran off home for your tea”. They prove apt, when Lucas takes the opportunity to bump off his dominating big sister. All those grand, fine-sounding political speeches, and it had been a simple case of sibling rivalry all along.
Crucially his motives are not despotic, to seize control from her, but narrow and entirely personalised. You could call them petty, insofar as that term could be applied to murder. On accomplishing this he immediately disappears from the narrative, his real work done.
Though, as you’re arbitrarily assigned different guides on arrival, your perspective might change accordingly. Ours was Stela Maris, presented as the idealistic heart of the group, who begs troubled head Lucas not to shoot. (When you hear them clashing, off-stage but audible, it’s not unlike being a child and hearing your parents argue.) But Lucas was guide to his own group, who might well have seen in him a more tragic figure, playing out a kind of Greek tragedy in which the rest of us were more incidental.
Similarly, while my group did some very English squirming and eye-averting when asked by both sides to join up, I wondered if others might become more engaged. Arifa Akbar’s Guardian review suggests her group did. While a review in GScene commented more sourly: “We listen to radicalised young people talk of lost childhoods and a system which crushes them, we look around and admire the baroque and rococo back rooms we find ourselves in. We stay silent.”
All of which is to the good. However…
The show is not short of incident, sometimes quite dramatically so. But incident is not necessarily the same thing as narrative. And the hectic rushing from one supposedly ‘safe’ place to another, then again, did feel at times like incident was trying to take the place of narrative.
And the use of technology did seem a little half-hearted. It mostly seemed additional, the tablets we were asked to carry just underlining things we were already seeing or being told by our guide. Had someone switched theirs off at the start, there’s little they’d have missed. Dramatically, there should have been more times when the tablets were guiding us, demanding our trust.
I wondered if this was out of concern that some more technofeared attendees might fail to follow along. But a suggestion at the initial briefing that we’d need to work together, moving as a group, might have allayed that. Perhaps a more extended period at the start, where the tablets try to guide you to your guide, with plans getting stymied at the last minute.
Overall… well, it’s a hard thing to get a grip on. If it often feels like a frustrating experience, that we pass through spaces without really engaging with anything – well, that’s kind of the point. It is, by a strict definition of the term, Absurdist. Things make no sense, then they’re over, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to deal with that. And that conflicts by definition with the standard dramatic needs, for closure and all of that. If you come away feeling dissatisfied and uninvolved, that’s kind of the point. What might feel like basic audience needs can just be at odds with the event.
But then again, other things have been Absurdist without this seeming so much of a problem. While it has much to commend it, you feel like it’s not *quite* there yet, it needs a little more road testing and fine-tuning. It couldn’t be claimed it equals their previous two festival offerings.
And finally (as they say on the news)… if this was more absurdist tragicomedy than political drama, there was still one clue which side the company might fall on. In the room of screens, both activists and cops supply a personal anecdote of how they came to be involved. And each activist has their own story while, like a troll farm, the cop tales are all identical…
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