Playing Puck

I've just played Puck in the Royal Shakespeare Company's latest production of A Midsummer Night's Dream . The thing is, I really have.

For their 40th production of Shakespeare's play, the RSC collaborated with Google Creative Labs on a hybrid live/digital theatre project. Midsummer Night's Dreaming  surrounded a one-off live, real-time performance of the play with a massive hinterland of digital material, amplifying the action and world of the play. 

Over the Midsummer weekend (21-23 June), Shakespeare's play was performed in real time. That is, Act 1 was presented on Friday evening. The events of Acts 2, 3 and most of 4 were given in the middle of the night, 2.30 on Sunday morning. The rest of Act 4 (the mechanicals reunited) took place in the afternoon on Sunday and Act 5 at close to midnight, ready for the Trinity Church's iron tongue of midnight to toll twelve and end the play.

This provided a certain focus and rallying point for all of the online activity which accompanied, interpreted and commented on the performance. The platform for the online material was Google + though there was also activity on Twitter; all of the material populated a dedicated website: http://dreaming.dream40.org/#

The online material was organised into a very large series of Google accounts, representing offstage characters, things, ideas, realms. There were fairies, Bottom's Mum, Mrs Snug, the Duke's Oak, an Athenian newspaper, Lysander's sister Ophelia (who gets her from a nunnery, overseen by the Abbess Volumnia), and much much more.

The only character to have an active presence in the online world and the live performed world was Puck and I played Puck.  Most of the online action kicked suddenly into life on Friday 21st. Puck, however, had been posting from the beginning of the month. Somehow we managed to get Puck promoted to Google+ account holders and pretty soon had thousands of followers, which provided a good platform to start orienting people towards the project and to start establishing an online character. Mark Hadfield - a lovely melancholically comic actor - played Puck in the live version, but I played Puck for the RSC in the online realm. It made some sense for Puck to act as this impish guide between the live and the digital, just as Shakespeare's Puck travels prodigiously between the human and fairy kingdoms.

Puck had two functions, I think. One was to promote the project by establishing a strong social media presence for the character; as Puck, I posted images of Puck from painting and past productions;  engaged with the news a bit; boasted about my ability to put a girdle around the earth in 40 minutes; answered questionnaires from theatre websites; presented some interesting or odd materials relevant to the show; and, most of all, interacted with people who wanted to talk to Puck.

As I've found with some other experiences of using social media is a quasi-dramatic way, I found that Puck quite quickly established a strong character, rather different from the one I anticipated. He was quite bad-tempered, I noticed, forever accusing people of misrepresenting him, particular Billy Shakespeare, an account run by the lovely Rachel Thompson; we had a very entertaining feud through the three weeks of the project ended only by Puck rescuing him from the aftermath of a debauched stag night with Hercules. He was also extremely libidinous, lusting after fairies and humans, flirting with his respondents, growling at the many fairies brought to his attention, including Lily Cole. I will admit, this surprised me, not having seen Puck as a particularly lascivious character.

One thing that has interested me about the project is that when I've mentioned to a few people what I'm doing, I usually say 'I'm playing Puck in the RSC's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream'. I say it for slightly comic effect, since everyone who knows me knows I'm not an actor. But yet it is literally, strictly true: I played Puck. I uttered the lines, I improvised, I responded to the audience; Puck was live. The words were the actor; the complex reconfigurations of space, identity and communication that the digital world afford us meant that I could be an actor in the act of writing.

The second function of Puck was slightly more problematic. Puck was also meant to be your guide through the project. There's a logic to that; he is a merry wanderer and can see everything, passing between worlds and so on. I'm not sure I managed to do that very effectively, if I'm honest, and there are reasons for that. The format of Google+ is very distinctive; the people you follow populate a page on screen more like a newspaper than a timeline (as in Twitter). It isn't very linear and indeed, people can repost things into your timeline so easily that sequence breaks down; well, sequence isn't the point. Also, unlike Twitter, it's immediately and clearly content-rich; a tweet-length image gets lost; far better to post videos or images or links, which show up connected to the post. It means that, in a good way, Google+ bombards you with a richness of stuff.

This is where it becomes difficult to guide someone through it. First, because it's not clear that there really was a clear path through the material; it was very hard to present material in any kind of order, so it couldn't easily be connected to the live performance, so time wasn't a principle of organisation; but to start simply curating my own subgroup of the material and selecting what I happended to find interesting seemed peculiar too; why would Puck, our guide through the material, ignore anything?

In addition, I eventually came to think that being a guide was antithetical to the joy of the project. At one point someone wondered if my role over the weekend was to 'edit the chaos'. But the project was the chaos, not the editing. Some online projects have been a bit half-hearted because ultimately there isn't enough to it; it's a bit thin. So for example, the RSC's previous foray into social-media theatre, Such Tweet Sorrow, from 2010, was fairly criticised by more online-savvy members of the theatre community. It was an attempt to create an online version of Romeo and Juliet  but there wasn't enough to it; the people in control of the feeds seemed freaked out by interactivity and unsure how to respond to criticism; there seemed very little space for creativity. Ultimately, it was just a series of tweets that described some imagined event; it wasn't performative. What I loved about Midsummer Night's Dreaming  was that there was so much of it, you never got to the end; there were constant characters, rich additional resources, strange interactions, loads of subplots, and by the time people were commenting on each other, it created a deep forest of story that you entered and could play in, be transformed by. Some people found the project confusing. I don't what the RSC or Google think, but I think that's okay. Some people find Shakespeare confusing. It required a bit of familiarity with Google+ and a willingness to engage with the technology just as you need to be ready to engage with the language when you see the play. I didn't edit the chaos; through Puck's interactions, his comments, his reposting and general ascerbity, I hope I intensified the chaos.

Watching the live version was pretty wonderful. We trooped into an upstairs rehearsal room on Sunday at 2.30am to watch the lovers fall apart among the trees. And, at ten to four in the morning, Puck warned Oberon to leave the forest:

    My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
    For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
    And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger

and the sun began to come up, perfectly on cue, with blackbirds chirruping busily in the background. We spilled onto a high terrace afterwards, watching the sun rise with a glass of wine and it did feel kind of, you know, magical. On the Sunday night, under a supermoon, I arrived a little late to the final showing and sat puckishly on a low wall to the side of the Dell where the final act was performed, watching both the actors, illuminated by lamps, and the audience, lit by the moon and the reflected lamplight from the actors' faces. It felt very much like the project lined up the liminality of theatre, the digital world, and the midsummer to effect a huge temporary transformation rippling across the world.

One Year to Activate You

​This is fun. Going through some old files I discovered this thing that I made in 2006. It was for, I think, the last of several workshops that Suspect Culture ran to develop the show Futurology (2007). The show was set at a conference and for a while we were very interested in corporate atmospheres and ruthless capitalism. I was asked to put together a mock-inspiring corporate motivation PowerPoint presentation. This is the result: One Year To Activate You. We had it playing on a loop for one of the days of the workshop until it began seriously to creep people out.

It's a list piece. The presentation mixes conventional corporate wisdom with moments of darkness and brutality and begins to be haunted by itself as it goes on. ​Click on the image above to watch.

Public Enemy

Richard Jones's new production of Ibsen's Public Enemy (or An Enemy of the People as it's more usually translated)​ is in a sharply version by David Harrower that pares the play back to reveal its fury and topicality. Ibsen wrote the play after the reception of Ghosts in 1881, which was denounced as indecent, obscene. Ghosts, from our vantage point, looks like a rather moral play which is intent on revealing the scandalous secrets of bourgeois life and condemning hypocrisy on the way. Ibsen usually wrote a play every two years but Public Enemy​ arrived only a year after Ghosts, perhaps saying something about the urgency and anger in which he wrote it.

Public Enemy​ concerns a well-liked Doctor in a small Norwegian spa town who discovers that the water system that feeds the spas is diseased. He is mocked, dropped by his former friends and collaborators; the townspeople turn against him and he ends the play a firm enemy of democracy and insists that the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. It's clearly a way of talking about his own experiences becoming a victim of public opinion for trying to tell the truth.

Jones/Harrower's version emphasises this by staging the fourth act - in which Stockmann attempts to hold a town hall meeting - very directly addressing and hectoring the audience. The tone becomes very contemporary and Harrower's script puts us in mind not on nineteenth century corruption but twenty-first century. The crassness of the tabloid press, the rise of Nigel Farage, the venality of the Liberal Democrats, they all seem to swim into view as Stockmann denounces democracy as the rule of the stupid.

That act was, for me, the most successful of them. Successful in two ways: first, it gave a sense of how caustic the play must have seemed when it first appeared; the brutality of the argument, the clear sense of an author breaking the fourth wall to berate the audiences who scorned him. It actually has a feel of Look Back in Anger about it, the author's voice overwhelming the form of the play to thrilling effect; second, in Harrower's version, we get a very interesting move from righteous indignation, social critique, to something near fascism. Eventually, Stockmann is ranting that we should all be exterminated. Stockmann moves, without explanation, from the idea that the majority is always right to the equally foolish position that the minority is always right (how would that​ work?) and one senses a retreat that may be protective, but may also be fascistic or just mad. Certainly at the end of the play, with Stockmann telling his family that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone, Jones did not direct the family to applaud his sentiment; instead they seem amused, uncertain, faintly embarrassed by his attempt to turn defeat into victory.

An Enemy of the People always has this ambivalence, I think. In Ibsen's version of the town meeting, there are lines for audience members; when they come to voting there's a drunk man who wants to vote yes and no and I've always rather agreed with him. The play is both a terrific vehicle for Stockmann/Ibsen's anger but it's also a pretty forensic analysis of the traps and contradictions of both men's positions. Stockmann's belief that you should simply be able to express the truth as you understand it, using the best evidence, is admirable in many ways but it is also naive about the reality of political and commercial interests and how they can combine to distort any means of communication. Those are the forces that Stockmann met and of course Ibsen met them too when he published Ghosts. But the means of communication are also complicated by the theatre. What Stockmann doesn't realise in his attempt to speak directly and transparently to the public in the Rousseauian open air of his meeting is that it can be - in fact, has to be - stage-managed; and because he doesn't do the stage managing, his political enemies do it for him. Ultimately, he is goaded into making the incautious statements that lead to his downfall. The ambiguity of the final position of the play is that he seems to have been trapped into developing his new attitude to the world by his opponents. This relativistically undermines the value of speaking the truth as one understands it.

This has some significance for Ibsen too. The play seems to both celebrate the socioclasmic force of Ghosts but also acknowledge a certain complexity. It's a complexity that disrupts Naturalism itself, which is caught between the scientific clarity of its truth-telling and the material and cultural mediations of its theatricality. The movement of Public Enemy, well brought out in Richard Jones's production, is from the first act in which truth is brought out from the depths into public space (there's a letter, opened offstage, brought out into the family, and from there will be launched to the world) to the reverse structure of the final act, in which the windows are broken and the family have retreated to the house: the public space has invaded the private, indeed even the privacy of Stockmann's mind. Ibsen's next play is The Wild Duck, a beautiful play which centrally (and unresolvedly) debates whether you should tell the truth, whatever the consequences, a view that has another brilliant drunkard as its antagonist, the kindly amoral Dr Relling.

Does Richard Jones's production work? Yeah, kind of. It zips along and captures the political argy-bargy of the play. It fully comes alive from Act 3 in the printer's office; this is perhaps because Richard Jones's cartoon style doesn't quite mesh with the domestic relationships in the first two acts. But this may smooth out during the run. Jones is always big and bombastic and loud so as soon as we're in the public sphere, things work better. Miriam Buether's set is a seventies, stripped-pine open-plan scandinavian Bungalow and, frankly, is distractingly ugly but does convince us that the story continues to speak to the contemporary era, if the seventies count as contemporary. David Harrower's version is tighter than Ibsen's but looser in its range of references and the savagery . I slightly felt it was at the expense of the characters but that's hard to distinguish from the effects of Richard Jones's day-glo production.

Nick Fletcher captures both Stockmann's charisma and his naivety, turning from hero to enemy as much through his own efforts as the efforts of his opponents. For me the real heart of the play was Charlotte Randle as Mrs Stockmann who seemed to me to give the production a moral authority and emotional seriousness that it otherwise lacked.

Fräulein Julie

Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner's Fräulein Julie​ opened at the Schaubühne in September 2010 and it has finally made its way to London at the Barbican Theatre. The idea of the show is that we follow the character of Kristin rather than the two protagonists. The story that thus emerges is created on stage level in a series of beautifully meticulous sets, a kitchen, hallway, a bedroom, and composed exquisitely on live digital video on a large screen above the set. We see Kristin readying the kitchen for the evening meal, hear her thoughts reflecting on the world, getting out of the way when Jean and Julie begin their flirtation, but listening in, spying on them, the next morning overhearing their post-coital plans and, finally, coming in to see Miss Julie's dead body. 

I can hardly praise this production enough. If I'm honest, I've never really loved Miss Julie​. I can admire it as a piece of writing and certainly you would be a fool not to acknowledge its importance, but it always seems me soured by Strindberg's misogyny which forces the plot, characters and guiding metaphors into a rather schematic shape. The two halves over-neatly pair up: Julie's flirtation/Jean's rejection, Julie lowering herself/Jean on the rise, Julie having power/Julie losing power, etc. I wrote about it a couple of years ago but could only really enjoy it by seeking out its contradictions. This production disrupts the misogyny by placing much of it 'offstage' and instead focusing on another woman, who, neglected and marginalised by Strindberg, does not bear the full stamp of his woman-hatred. And by focusing on her, it twists the play out of shape and rids it of its schematism.

This production is a kind of palimpsest, a new play written on top of Miss Julie. That might sound like a violation of the play in some sense and no doubt there will be some die-hards who want to see a traditional Miss Julie​ but in many ways I found the performance an oddly faithful rendering. For one thing, it's respecting Strindberg's experimentalism: he was someone reading the Paris papers, hearing all about Antoine and the Théâtre Libre, avidly reading Zola's articles and wanting to join the Naturalist movement. He was also someone reading Nietzsche - and in fact becoming his correspondent - and wanting to put some of those new philosophical ideas on stage. He revived the play himself almost 20 years later when he had been through his Inferno-phase breakdown, reinvented himself as a Symbolist writer (the incomparable Chamber plays), proto-Expressionist (To Damascus) and proto-Surrealist (A Dream Play). He was a ceaseless experimenter with theatre and this production, in continuing to experiment, is faithful to the spirit, if not the letter of Miss Julie.​

But also it picks up on the voyeurism of Naturalism. My colleague Chris Megson put it rather well when he described Kristin as the most obsessive voyeur in all Naturalism and she is the natural embodiment of Naturalism's desire to peek into the forbidding basement rooms, the secret lives, the marginalised and ignored taboo relationships in a society. The cameras make us able to inspect the characters very close up watching the quiver of a lip, the movements on an eye; the camera makes possible even more naturalistic acting performances and an even closer naturalistic inspection of their worlds. Strindberg was looking at a taboo relationship in several ways: a cross-class relationship, an act of adultery, he was placing the sex act quite outside of a romantic or loving relationship as an animal act (these are the terms in which he writes) and then he shows one view of how men and women react after sex. It's a play that shines a light into dark corners and in that sense it's entirely in the spirit of the play to shine a light into the dark corners of this play and find Kristin's story.

The interweaving of digital video and audio with the live action is beautifully done. It's hard to describe how miraculously composed the images are on the screen. The lighting, the framing, the colour and texture make almost every image a beautiful artwork in itself. When I saw Waves in 2006, I was amazed by the richness and beauty of the images; but I remember wondering if it was a one-trick pony. Would it tend to make every production the same? Since then I've been delighted by how rich and various the effects of the live video composition are. In Waves​ the video images suggested a kind of nostalgic warmth, the neatness of the images suggesting the editorialising unreliability of memory; Attempts on Her Life (2007) couldn't have been more different, the projected images being the plastic branded mediated images of mass culture, jagged and soulless. In ...some trace of her ​(2008), Mitchell's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, the work of the eye was to reconcile the chaotic stage-level action with the artful black & white simple renderings above, which suggested the disparity between Prince Myshkin's (the 'idiot' of the title) optimistic belief in the goodness of people and the scheming, money-grabbing, cynicism of the world around him. Look down and you see a world red in tooth and claw, look up and you see the world as Myshkin sees it

Here I suppose I thought we were closest to ...some trace of her  but what we were reconciling were two kinds of theatrical language. Above, on the screen, in a sense we're seeing a kind of ultimate naturalism. The detail, the textures, the minute inspection of human behaviour placed in an equally detailed social context. At stage level we were seeing something high modernist. In its laying bare of the device we were in the world of Brecht and there was a clear emphasis on the craft skills of the actors, camera operators, foley artists, moving between positions, swapping roles that was wholly admirable and always remained a counterpoint to the immaculately conceived images on screen. But we were also in the arena of Symbolist theatre. Symbolism, the first anti-Naturalist theatre movement, was interested not in material reality but transcendence and the numimous, the supernatural affinity of things, the mysterious oneness of the cosmos. This expressed itself in supernatural beings, nameless spirits, doubles, ghosts, and more. The stage-level spectacle of Fräulein Julie was very much that: often to compose a video sequence Jule Böwe would be playing Julie (with stoic, granite simplicity), but elsewhere on the set someone else is playing her hands for a close up, a third person is playing her back in a long shot, while the Foley artists are supplying the sounds of her work. On screen she is a naturalistic unity, at stage level she is multiplied into several doppelgängers who flit with such skill and accuracy from mark to mark that one might almost see them as ghosts, passing through Miss Julie's walls.

In a curious way, it's intensely theatrical; it struck me watching it that this would be a show that would lose everything if broadcast live to cinemas in a way that pure purely 'theatrical' shows would not. It's important to say that we don't simply watch the screen; this isn't a movie. Because we don't just watch the stage-level action; we watch the two, the eye passing from one to the other and this pattern of movements is theatrical; it's quite different from the directedness of the movie camera. Just as the work of the video and audio technicians is to combine all these various ghosts into a single, seamless series of images the work of the audience is to hold together the two parts of the stage picture: the exposed, sprawling, fast-moving, sometimes frantic, contemporary, digital, functional, multiple image of the videomakers unfolding against the darkness of the theatre and then the smooth, elegant, still, quiet, emotional, restrained, nineteenth-century composition on the screen, unfolding in thick, pale, Scandinavian light. And it also produces an intense experience of liveness: it's tense: you wait for failures. You note differences between the stage and the screen: moments where a medium shot and close-up are imperfectly matched, a tiny error of movement will be magnified tenfold on screen.

Katie Mitchell, in the post-show discussion I chaired with her, claimed that the value of the video was just to be able to inspect things more closely and, sure, that's the naturalistic part of the deal, but it seems to me that it has a role in enhancing liveness and making the Naturalistic uncanny. We see these miraculous compositions on screen but we know they are somehow not real; whether Mitchell wants this or not, there is both a presentation and critique of Naturalism at work in this piece. I even wondered if the expertise of the sound technicians were commenting ironically on Naturalism. We see the sounds being produced separately to accompany the screened images and while the skill and ingenuity is undoubted, at times it felt as though the piece was offering us laborious tautology (seeing the action, hearing the action) as a kind of critique of the constructedness of the real.

Katie Mitchell is our greatest director, I think. No one brings such intelligence, seriousness, commitment, vision and exquisitely beautiful taste to theatre production. This investigation is entirely in the spirit of nineteenth century Naturalism with its avowed wish to examine human beings the way a surgeon dissects a corpse. On this occasion she has conducted an autopsy on Strindberg's play and found out what makes it truly alive.

Narrative

Narrative is ​Anthony Neilson's latest show, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. In his usual way, it's developed and written through rehearsals; the title was only announced a couple of weeks before first night (my tickets just state 'a new play by Anthony Neilson'). It looks like a very innovative practice - only Neilson and Mike Leigh seem to officially get to work like this - though plenty of writers work right up to the wire and beyond (I hold my guilty hand up). Alan Ayckbourn announces a play and a title and writes the play just about in time for the start of rehearsals. Many or even most performance companies have only a title and a handful of ideas when a show is sold to a tour. Nonetheless, Neilson is unusual in walking the high wire so publicly. And I think it helps create an exhilarating quality to the performances, a roughness, a provisionality, a sense that the work has not be dulled by endless fernickety contemplation. The shows made this way are coarse and immediate and angular and brilliant.

Narrative is no exception. It's gonna be very hard to describe but here goes. The show comprises a large number of small-scale storylines which kind of intersect but kind of don't. Two actors share a flat; one suddenly gets cast in the lead of a massive Hollywood blockbuster, Elastic Man​, to the envious horror of his friend; but his success is tainted by anxiety - someone has been sending him anonymously photographs of an arsehole - he doesn't know why and begins to wonder if somehow it is photograph of his own arsehole; the unsuccessful actor auditions ludicrously for a terrible advert for a stupid product, the Foot Mouse; the representative of the advertiser is the successful actor's ex-girlfriend, a neurotic and over-committing woman, who acquires and loses three lovers during the show; the last of these is a woman, an intense young woman who works as a waitress (and supplies Elastic Man with the anonymous arsehole); at one point, in a chat with a friend, this young woman stabs her in the neck and, it seems, kills her. The act is pointless, unmotivated, out of nowhere, and as a result this young murderer acquires bison horns (see above). This doomed woman has just split up with a boyfriend a man who thinks that what is wrong with young people is they want everything now and can't commit long-term. Another woman is campaigning to have an acne treatment banned because it is thought to have a side-effect of stimulating suicidal thoughts - and her son took his own life after using it; eventually, though, she discovers that her son didn't use the treatment at all; she also acquires horns.

Yeah, that's really not much of a story. Which is, of course, the point. The show is investigating the very possibility of writing a story now. Narrative is, I suppose, generally thought to carve a satisfying shape out of the world and distribute meaning through it. It provides information, crisis, and closure, rewards or denies efforts, grants significance to lives, relationships, problems and disasters. Narrative​ asks a number of questions about these aspects of narrative.

First, does everything have significance? When Imogen suddenly stabs her friend, there's no explanation; she just acts. Is this an unnarratable event? It seems to suck meaning out of the world and face us with pure existential action that seems without narratable meaning. When Christine Entwhistle's character discovers that her son did not take the drug she's been campaigning about, it renders her efforts absurd; when Oliver Rix is picked to be Elastic Man, there's no explanation of why it happens, why him and not his friend? Who is sending the arsehole photographs? We never know.

Second, are we now too short-termist to cope with narrative? The question is explored through one-sided relationships, one person wanting to commit long term, the other denying the commitment. Brian Doherty condemns Sophie Ross for her lack of commitment and I found myself agreeing but then also found Zawe Ashton's character absurd in her attempt to cling onto a dead relationship. There's a genuine perplexity here.

Third, and perhaps most powerfully, death seems to be what turns lives into narrative but also what deprives them of meaning. The show begins with what looks like a museum film discussing one of the cave painting at Lascaux which appears to depict a bison attacking a man. The voiceover remarks that the image does not merely show us an event, but a narrative; by showing us a death, it allows us to speculate about a life; it shows us causality, sequence, closure, even an arc. Death, to coin a cliché, is the ultimate narrative closure. But at the same time, death's meaninglessness or perhaps its unfathomability renders life itself hard to understand. In the movies, the boy's struggles to get the girl are given meaning and justification when, at the end of the movie, he gets to girl. But what does death signify or justify? It's a zero, rewarding voidly our living efforts and draining those of purpose. This is marked throughout by the meaningless death of Sophie's character, the meaningless death of Christine's son, right through to the meaningless end.

I've rather made it sound like a rather bleak and abstract experience. Narrative joins Realism as an up-front examination of theatrical form (if we're voting for the next in the series, I'm putting a bid in for Character​), but, as always with Neilson, the show is funny, filthy, and thrillingly ragged. It completely holds its stage and our attention and I want to make a show this way.