what happens to the hope at the end of the evening

In a leafy street in Surrey, in January 2012, Eric shoots Neil. Neil is badly wounded and, ambulance sirens blaring, is rushed to a hospital in London. Eric, in a fit of remorse, turns the gun on himself.  Neil is in intensive care slipping in and out of consciousness for several weeks and, despite all the best efforts of the doctors, in late March he dies. 

Where and when was Neil killed? He wasn't killed in January, because he was still alive in March. He wasn't killed in Surrey, since he was still alive in London. So was he killed in London in March? This seems strange because he wasn't just killed, he was killed by Eric. But by March Eric was dead. Let's add, for the hell of it, the additional thought that Eric is agoraphobic and has never left his Surrey home. It then becomes additionally odd to say that Eric killed Neil in March in London, if he's never been to London and was dead at the time. If we try to say that he was killed between London and Surrey from January to March 2012, it seems to do linguistic violence to the specificity of the gunshot.

It's a philosophical puzzle that, inevitably, has detained a lot of philosophers, trying to unpick some of the peculiarities of action, intention, and responsibility and the different levels of descriptions we have of these things [1].

I thought of this puzzle a couple of weeks ago when I fell out with an old friend. I'm not brilliant at keeping in touch with people and nor is he; I'd intermittently noted to myself that we've not spoken or emailed for a year and kept trying to remind myself to get in touch.  It occurred to me that while I knew my silence was a mixture of busy and lazy, his silence could be that he was cross with me for a reason I didn't know; but he could have been thinking the same. Then, a fortnight ago, we bumped into each other at the theatre and I thought I'd detected a certain coolness in his greeting. I emailed him the next day to ask if we were okay, mentioning my own perception of the last year and our meeting. His response was to deny that we had fallen out but also to express disapproval in my making it all about me; in fact, he said, (a) he'd been ill and (b) he was talking to someone else. What I detected was not about me at all. 

It was a paradoxical response (at least as I received it) . It denied that we'd fallen out, but seemed to enact a falling-out in the process. The denial that we'd fallen out seemed to be expressed in a way characteristic of people who have already fallen out. We seemed  to fall out, in other words, because we had already fallen out yet it also seemed to be  my suggestion that we may have fallen out that made us fall out.

I thought of the puzzles about action. When did we fall out? Was it at the moment of in some originary action of mine last year (of which I'm unaware)? In the silence over the past year? In the cool greeting? In my email? In the reply? Did we slowly, gently fall out over the course of a long year, or did we fall out in the blink of an eye, in a misunderstood greeting or a misunderstood email? Where did we fall out? At the place of the greeting? In front of my computer? In front of his? When a friendship falls apart, what I feel most strongly, almost physically, is the gap and the distance; the diminished friendships spatialised as if friendship is something that fills the air between us, places us in the same world. For me, friendship's end is a sudden apprehension of the spaces between us all.

These sad reflections prepared me well for Tim Crouch and Andy Smith's what happens to the hope at the end of the evening , performed as part of the Almeida Festival, in which two old friends meet, fall out, and fall back in. The story, such as it is, concerns Tim, who is in the North-West for an anti-fascist demo and arranges to spend the night at his old friend Andy's house outside Lancaster. Andy and Tim are both married, Andy blissfully, Tim unhappily - it transpires that he's having an affair and the marriage is in trouble. Andy is domesticated, calm, doing a PhD at Lancaster University. Tim is unsettled, aggressive, a drinker, paranoid about the boys gathering on the green outside Andy's house. Andy is rather judgmental about Tim's life and attitudes; Tim wants Andy to loosen the fuck up and chill the fuck out. Eventually, they overcome their awkwardness - the awkwardness of friends who haven't seen each other for a long time, who have probably moved on in their lives - and they spend a little time together.

This achievement, spending a little time together, is no mean feat, and is given valency in the show. Early on, Andy explains that spending time together is one of his favourite things: in that context he means, Andy and us - the audience - in the same room together. Andy and Tim enter, in fact, from the audience, as if to emphasise (or maybe it's just true) that there are no privileged spaces that distinguish us. (In fact, there's an offstage space, where they get props and bits of set from, though it sort of felt like a shallow  space - no one was there long; we saw everything come from there; it was an open secret). This was a show about communion, about with each other and for each other, about the way we might take each other as ends not means, a show about the radical potential of spending a little time together.

But the show also theatrically embodies the distance between people. Andy and Tim are on stage together, but they are not in the same space, not at all. Andy sits stage left; Tim roams stage right and they hardly ever leave their respective sides of the stage. At various moments, Tim asks Andy to join him and mostly Andy refuses. Andy is reading from a script, Tim is speaking from memory, as if spontaneously; Andy is speaking to us, Tim is speaking to Andy. Andy seems to be Andy (Andy is doing a PhD at Lancaster; he lives where Andy lives in the play; he is married to that person; they have that child), but Tim isn't 'Tim' (he's been married for much longer, doesn't travel the country participating in anti-fascist demos as far as I know, has a quite different personality); put another way, 'Tim' is fictional but 'Andy' is realesque; Tim assembles a sort of realistic 'living room' set (he laboriously brings on stuff) while Andy sits with his script on a music stand, denying realism of representation; and Tim is an actor, but Andy is a performer (I'll let you guys work out what that means). All of this means the two men can't spend time together because they seem barely to be in the same universe, let alone the same room.  

This provides a deep set of foundations for the disagreements and misunderstandings that emerge between these men.  Watching the show, I was surprised to think a lot about Harold Pinter; perhaps because the show is about the aggression that lurks between even friendly male friendships. The first thing Andy says directly to Tim is 'alright, mate'? 'Mate' is one of those ambiguous terms that appears to be friendly but can just as easily express hostility or contempt. The men address each other as 'mate' throughout the play; in Tim's mouth it appears to be a constant challenge or accusation (are you my friend?); in Andy's it seems to be an appeal (be my friend). Andy repeatedly tells us the time and that he is 'waiting for my friend': the phrase initially refers to Tim's late arrival, but eventually it accumulates the suggestion that Tim has arrived but the friendship has not. Throughout, the show seems ambivalent about whether (these) men can genuinely be together or whether rivalry and rancour will always undo their attempts to make contact.

It's a show about male friendship, but, as always with Tim Crouch and Andy Smith's work, it's an investigation of theatre.  Throughout their work together, Tim Crouch has tried to erase the gap between actor and audience. He doesn't do a warm up, doesn't get into character, is often onstage as the audience arrives, always looks at and addresses us, sometimes sits amongst us. He's described ‘placing the audience in a dark space [...] getting them to sit still and quiet while we subject them to indulgent and impersonated fantasies’ as ‘an abuse of power’ [2]. This is not to say that Crouch must think he has abolished the distinction between us and them; he's drawing attention to it. In this instance, it's not just Tim and Andy who struggle to be in the same room, but it's them and us. Andy addresses us directly; early on he asks us to greet those around us with the words 'pleased to meet you' (a mishearing of the Anglican 'peace be with you'); later he asks us to take our shoes off just as he asks Tim to take his shoes off: 'It shows you've arrived at a place. It shows you're really here,' he says.

That concern for the 'real' sits on the performance as a horizon, something glimpsed at the edge of theatre. The theatre seems to be a place of great realness - liveness, co-presence, spatially and temporally specific, unrepeatable, unique - but at the same time undoes the real, duplicating and pluralising it. Tim (I think) says to Andy 'I can't remember the last time we sat down and had a real conversation,' which is a moot observation since they are now sitting down and having a fictional, scripted and rehearsed conversation. Does taking our shoes off make us really here? Where is here? The Almeida or Andy's house? (This question is asked throughout: 'Can I stay here?' asks Tim. 'Where?' replies Andy; later, in response to Andy's request that they sit together, Tim asks aggressively 'where do you mean? where exactly do you mean?')

At several moments in the show, Tim and Andy pause and look out at us. These moments foreground and problematise our co-presence. Tim is in a fictional world (rather more so than Andy, who breaks the fourth wall) so when he looks out at us, who does he think he's looking at? Through the show, his paranoid worries about the kids outside seem to reflect to the odd position of the actor in a fictional representation thinking about the audience: 'it feels like a goldfish bowl,' he worries, 'people staring in'. But also, in those silences, who are we? who are they? Are we expected to act? Free to act? Are these the comfortable silences of old friends? Are they the conversational vacuums of people with nothing to say to each other? I reflected on Tim Crouch's persona; in his earlier shows, he often acknowledges the audience, tries to put the audience at their ease, smiles a lot, handles the room. But this doesn't just put us at our ease: Crouch is a physically quite forbidding figure, six-foot-something, shaved head; meeting our gaze is, in a way, a very challenging thing to do. There is an ambiguity and ambivalence in that mode of address just as this show doesn't pretend it's easy to spend time together.

It took me back to the last collaboration I saw by Crouch and Smith, which was Smith's performance text, Commonwealth, which I saw Crouch perform as a 'surprise theatre' at the Royal Court on 2 July. Commonwealth  is a story about a theatre performance, the audience who go to see it, what they hope to get from it, and what the event achieves. Like this one, Commonwealth  is a coin balanced on its edge, with one face showing here and now and the other face showing elsewhere. Crouch/Smith were both incredibly precise about the audience and incredibly general: 

And at the beginning of this story these people get together, they gather together in this room like this. 

They come through the doors a bit like those ones and sit down in some chairs a bit like these ones. They come in and sit down and gather together. 

The audience is a bit like us; what they do is not unlike what we do; they are sitting on chairs rather like those we are sitting on. But they are, it seems, a hypothetical, fictional audience. In Commonwealth we are both ourselves and others; both shows find a theatrical structure to explore being together.

The show sort of affirms the value of the theatre, both as a way of diagnosing what separates us and as a means of bringing us together. It draws attention to the boundary that we are on when we take part in an audience and uses that to model the curious mixture of freedom and obligation that seizes us when we are with others. It's another remarkable piece from Tim Crouch and Andy Smith and one of the most beautiful pieces I've seen this year.

UPDATE: 

If you liked this you'll love these! Fine pieces on the same subject by Catherine Love, Andrew Haydon and Dan Hutton. 

Notes 

1. See, for example, Alan R. White, 'Shooting, Killing and Fatally Wounding', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 80 (1979 - 1980), pp. 1-15. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544947>

2. Tim Crouch. ‘Darling You Were Marvellous’ in Caridad Svich (ed.) Out of the Silence. Roskilde: Eyecorner, 2012, p. 106.

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.