‘UNCHAIN ME’ BY DREAMTHINKSPEAK

Pavilion Estate, part of the Brighton Festival

”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…

BEFORE I SLEEP

A highly subjective account of a site-responsive promenade performance by DreamThinkSpeak in the old Co-op Building, Brighton

“We struggle to change life so that those who come after us might be happy, but those who come after us will say as usual it was better before, life now is worse than it used to be.” 

- Chekhov

“The question is whether in creating new things that we want, we also destroy things that we need.” 
- Performance programme

A first has occurred. This is the first time Lucid Frenzy has reported on something late deliberately. When the performance company DreamThinkSpeak took over the empty old Co-op building on Brighton’s London road for a “site-responsive promenade performance”, it was initially for the Brighton Festival in May. But popular demand extended this not once but twice, and it finally finished on July 4th. Moreover, as you emerge from the events a notice requests you not to spill the “secrets” of what you’ve seen. (In fact even the programme contains no images from the performance itself.) So this piece couldn’t have been written until after the much-delayed final night! (If anyone points out this means it could have been posted any time from July 5th I will become all tetchy...)

You may be wondering what a “site-responsive promenade performance” is all about, or guessing that it’s probably a way of saying “high-concept but vacuous piece of arty crap.” Normally I would share such healthy cynicism. Yet trust me, for once it is misplaced...

The old Co-op was transformed and mutated into a fresh environment, in a hybrid of performance and installation piece. Rather than take your seats and watch a set sequence of events get underway, you were admitted in small groups at staggered intervals. At points you would obligingly follow set paths, at others find your own route. There’d be times when you’d interact with proceedings you encountered, and others where you’d merely observe them.

The piece’s twin bases were in Chekhov’s ’Cherry Orchard’ and the Co-op building itself. But you didn’t really need much foreknowledge of either. As Dominic Maxwell wrote in 'The Times', it “honours Chekhov, builds on Chekhov, but needs no knowledge of Chekhov.”

Analogy corner: It was like a remix of Chekhov’s play, the way linear pop songs get spliced and rearranged, little phrases magnified by recurrance until they start to take on a whole new meaning. Alternately, it was like one of Dali’s works where he’d reprise and mutate myths from more classical paintings. Figures, scenes and images would constantly recur in new forms and arrangements; sometimes life-size, sometimes as models or rooms in dolls’ houses, sometimes video projections. Most recurrent, apart from the titular orchard, were the aristocratic couple awaiting service at their table and the elderly servant bringing a tray to them - a simple image of the ordered old world unaware of what was in store for it.

Plays commonly have a three-act structure; the performance countered with a three-floor structure.  (‘The Cherry Orchard’ actually has four acts, but let’s not allow that to spoil a good analogy!) You first enter through the basement, a subterranean realm which represents our past and the character’s present. They often stop at our approach, gazing in surprise and irritation at our ill-mannered intrusion. They reply indignantly in (presumably) Russian, making communication impossible. We see them only through patinas; behind sheets of semi-frosted glass, by looking down at models or peering through slots, or through water-lines. (The recurring motif of the diving costume comes in here, suggesting the past is another world to ours just as the underwater environment is.)

But when we enter the ground floor we burst into a brightly lit department store, where an array of salespeople appear to greet us. The juxtaposition is like crossing a dimension, with the new dimension of course the present. While the past had spoken a foreign language each of the salespeople patters in a different language. (Even though you are aware they are acting, you feel the familiar awkwardness of being abroad and trapped within your own tongue.) Of course the babble of languages represents globalisation. (Some pedants might object that, far from multiplying languages, globalisation is reducing them to a Newspeak of a debased American English. But are we that kind of men?)

The past was progressed through by a linear path, lit by oil-lamps or candles. But in the present a shadowy maze of corridors break off from a bright central room, many of them merely leading back to the same room. You become almost apprehensive, trying to find your way away from the sales floor but forever being returned to it. Rather than escape routes, these sub-rooms and corridors feel something like the Freudian id, mere repressed reflections of the main arena. One darkened room was full of massed mannequins, another dead orchard.

As fresh parties of punters arrive on the sales floor behind us, and the sales staff recite the same babble-greetings, we become aware the actors are doing the same thing over and over. Theoretically we know this to be true of every theatre performance. We even talk to friends who saw the same show on different nights, expecting their experience to be identical.  But during the show we switch the information off to enjoy the moment. Here that awareness is an essential part of the piece. The effect is quite purgatorial, as if there’s no escape or release.

Now the past is over, experience no longer occurs in groups. As soon as we entered the sales floor, with it’s maze of offshoots, I immediately lost the people I had been admitted with. The general audience now becomes visible, milling around. But this very addition reduces you to an individual within a crowd, just as you are when out shopping.

When finally reached, the final, upper floor must almost by definition be the future. It would be almost glib to call it post-modern, it feels almost post-apocalyptic. For the first time there are no human actors, just an array of video screens in empty rooms. There’s no longer language barriers because there’s no longer language. Some attendees complained of the comparative emptiness of the top floor, yet this barren-ness hits as hard as the babbling busyness before, and has its own meaning. One vast room is filled with Max Richter’s mournful score (riffing of Berber’s ’Adagio For Strings)’, while you focus on what’s not there - a life-size but cut-down cherry orchard filling a room. As the programme notes, “the overriding sense is that we are witnessing a world in collapse rather than renewal.” Even when you run into other punters it doesn’t seem to matter much, it feels just as deserted. Earlier we ran into ghosts of the past. Now it’s as if we’ve become them.

The videos at first look cyclic, but aren’t. In one the servant wanders a forest, proffering a cup and saucer with no-one to take it from him, a function now nothing but an empty gesture. The camera pulls back from this tangled forest to reveal he’s alone on an island. This moment seemed to sum up the whole environment, in both theme and tone. The servant is the most-seen figure, a man marooned by time, adhering to old ways where all that is left is absence. The image is humorous but (particularly given the cumulative effect) strangely moving.

Yet the performance actually ends with an unexpected image - a cherry tree back in bloom, an arresting sight in the middle of an apparently derelict urban building. It’s types of time which have been vying all along. The old, cyclic time of the cherry orchard is replaced first by the linear time of the industrial world, then the multi-tasking tangled time of modernity (characterised by the overlapping sales soundbites), then the seeming death of time (the mournful musical refrain looping almost in parody of cyclic time).
 

In analysing something, you inadvertently break it into its component parts. Yet it’s often only when those parts are put together that its purpose becomes discernable. Here, alas, we have talked of the “promenade performance” before moving onto the “site-responsive”. But it’s crucial to the piece that the building was not some architectural canvas, on which to hang their works. To quote again from the programme, “we strive to design scenes that respond to and sit within the host site, as if they have always belonged there.”  While wandering, the quicker you stop trying to figure what’s a prop and what’s an actual part of the environment, the more the two blend into one and the faster you feel like you’re getting it.

This site-responsive effect was enhanced for me by two factors. First, if somewhat prosaic-sounding, I used to shop in the Co-op! (While the director mentions buying his fridge there, I picked up some saucepans. But now they handle’s broken on one and I can’t take it back.) After I’d seen the show I’d sometimes pass by on London Road, and see it’s activity through the windows. Transforming such an everyday space into something so numinous is part of the magical effect.

But its also a reminder that the closure of the Co-op, most likely to be replaced by an arcade of branded stores topped by yuppie ‘apartments’, is itself a chopping-down of a world just as the cherry orchard was. Yuppification is a huge problem in Brighton, as career-chasers elect to move to somewhere ‘artistic’ and price all the artists out. Perhaps the way the performance extended through word-of-mouth (and certainly many people were talking about it), suggests it did trigger some local sense that the Co-op should have a wake.

Yet for me such department stores always had something numinous about them. Back in my Seventies youth they were still common, and Saturdays would see my family shop in them. The performance brought back how monumental they seemed to my child mind, how I’d sneak away to explore them alone, vast arenas full of sofas, cathedrals to beds, a gargantuan contrast to the small bungalow we called home.

It could be argued that the sheer scale and ambition of the piece set itself a bar which was then hard to reach. And it’s true some parts were more memorable, and more pertinent to the overall themes, than were others. Yet this scale was important in its own right, in immersing you in its atmosphere. Cinema-goers sometimes comment that they “felt inside” a particularly involving film. Yet with this piece you were inside it, rather than merely looking in. You were completely immersed in another world for a good couple of hours. And, while different film viewers might notice or respond to different elements in their own ways, here audience members could at times quite literally go different ways. When you walked out afterwards it took time to readjust.

Given its site-specific nature, it seems unlikely this piece will ever be repeated. However the company will hopefully be up to bold new explorations. If their future adventures can equal this, they will certainly be worth seeing. Coming to a disused shopping centre near you..?

The shop window photos are mine. The reflections symbolise the performance’s interaction with its environment, and are nothing to do with my witless inability to take the shots without them. More here.

- The Guardian interviews the director.

Coming Soon! Stuff that’s still more hopelessly late...