Film, liveness, archives

Nyatt School Redux

In the aftermath of our archiving project CHECKPOINT, and recent work like SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA that has blended theatre and film, I've been thinking more about the potential in the relationship between the two art forms. We tend to think of theatre as the live form - less stable, more unpredictable - and film as the finished product that is pretty much the same wherever it goes. But I'm not so sure any more.

Back in April, while the CHECKPOINT project was running, I went to see a performance by the legendary American company The Wooster Group at the Coronet Theatre in West London. It was called NYATT SCHOOL REDUX, and was a reworking of the same company’s famous piece NYATT SCHOOL, originally performed in 1978. Both pieces were directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, and featured Kate Valk. The 1978 play had been co-created by the great Spalding Gray, and the opening scene marked his first foray into the autobiographical monologue form for which he was to become celebrated. What was fascinating for me was the way in which the new play was generated from a dialogue with the old one, featuring archival material which was sometimes re-created and sometimes questioned. At the start of the performance, Kate Valk (50 years older than she was when she appeared in the original work) showed the audience some newly-restored archival videos of Gray’s opening monologue from the original production. In it, Gray described his early work in theatre and played vinyl records from his own archival collection, including an LP of T.S. Eliot’s THE COCKTAIL PARTY, featuring Sir Alec Guinness. 

Somewhere behind Gray’s opening monologue was the memory of his mother’s suicide: Eliot’s play is about the sacrifice of a selfless young woman, and Guinness’s character attempts to make sense of it for the survivors. Somewhere behind the new play, and Valk’s opening monologue which mirrors Gray’s, there is the suicide of Gray himself in 2004. 

The play was incredibly moving. 

All theatre, even the lightest of comedy, is actually on some level about death. That’s because the art form is live, meaning that our experience of it is different from the way we experience a novel, a painting, a film or a poem. The performance exists only in the moment, and then is gone: and this is also true of life itself. The transitory nature of theatre reminds us of our own mortality, and so demands an intensity of attention, an entering into the experience, that transforms that sense of mortality into an embrace of life in its fullness. In the theatre, whether as performer or as audience, you feel very much alive and present.

This could be taken as suggesting that the archiving of performance is an unnecessary, even a futile action, but the Wooster Group’s work demonstrates the contrary. In Spalding Gray’s original monologue, the recorded voice of Alec Guinness served as a trace of a performance that had once been, that could not be experienced again, but that could be archived and remembered. In NYATT SCHOOL REDUX, the grainy black and white video of Gray himself, with its moments of sound loss and its poor focus, made present his very absence. His death was all the more real because of the archiving of his intensely lived performance work. The presentation through performance of that archival material by Kate Valk and Elizabeth LeCompte, now 69 and 82 respectively, was at once an act of mourning and a joyous, comic celebration of life, of theatre, and of the filmic archive.

Suppliants of Syria - Fatima and the actors

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA was a very different kind of show, but here again the video elements served as stimuli for the live performance, and acquired new energy from the interaction. In one of my favourite moments Fatima, a Syrian woman whom we had interviewed in Turkey, asks a really important question: why do European governments try so hard to stop people fleeing from war, oppression and starvation?  The question was followed by a series of tortuous explanations and silences from the actors, while Fatima's benign presence remained above the stage, exuding a calm wisdom and a profound bafflement. The actors in this piece serve as representatives of the audience, bringing into the public space of theatre the doubts and frustrations so many of us feel around our relationship to the world beyond our borders. In another moment, we used archive footage from the ancient theatre at Palmyra, which ISIS / Daesh used as a place of execution. Here the interaction was with the young actor Tobi, describing his own first experience of theatre, and realising how disturbingly close the thrill of witnessing a performance can be to the horror of public murder. Again, the live performance and the video material interacted in a way that changed the audience's response to each of them, and made something new from the synthesis.

Shab-Nameh

Last week, at the London Film Festival, I saw what was billed as a "live film performance" by the Iranian film-maker Maryam Tafakory. SHAB-NAMEH involved the projection of sequences from archive footage, alongside Tafakory's commentary from the side of the stage. Sometimes she spoke while the film played, sometimes she halted it overtly and deliberately, sometimes a film sequence would end and she would talk for a while in response. Before the event, she had underlined the importance of the moment when many of the texts she spoke were written, and mentioned the date as she got to them. To give just one example, there was a text written on 7th April 2026: the day Trump threatened that "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." The text included Tafakory saying that the massacre perpetrated by the Iranian regime in January already seemed very far away. I don't recall her exact words, but they were questioned afterwards by another Iranian woman in the audience, who wanted to emphasise the brutality of the Islamic Republic, and said that the January massacre remained an open wound. Takafory reminded her of the specific timing of the text. She was herself deeply opposed to the regime, and had been horrified by the events in January - but her point was that Trump's threats to the entire Iranian people eclipsed even that. Every other work she had ever made expressed anger against the regime, she explained, but this time it felt necessary to turn her attention elsewhere. 

This isn't something that a "finished" film can do, of course. Once its statement is made, it is unchanging (at least for the author - the way an audience reads it can and does mutate). The introduction of live interaction with filmed material serves to mediate and to contextualise. As soon as film is put into dialogue with theatre, we can see if differently. It becomes a resource, a trace of other lives, a participant in an evolving discourse. At a time when we need to reassert the importance of liveness, this seems a very necessary action. 

Killing Fascists - Sound and Silence

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

Last month, I went to see Tiago Rodrigues' extraordinary play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at the National Theatre. It was a rare and welcome bit of international programming by the National, even if it was only a week's run in the theatre's smallest space. It felt important that this piece should be seen here. Like most of Europe, indeed most of the world, Britain risks being taken over by the extreme right. Our theatres are being very coy about it.  A wake-up call from Portugal, the European country which had the longest-lasting and most overlooked Fascist dictatorship of them all, felt timely and urgent.

It's a superb piece of work, with many threads running through it. To kill or not to kill. Violence against women and male solidarity with the victims (all the anti-fascist family are called Catrina, all of them wear skirts). Living with the land (a fascist trope turned on its head by the farming family). Critical or journalistic writing has tended to concentrate on the ending, when the kidnapped fascist politician, spared by 26-year old female Catarina's decision not to kill, turns to the audience and delivers a 20-minute monologue packed with right-wing hatred. The UK press concentrated on how, in mainland Europe, that had become the occasion for loud heckling, walk-outs and even a stage invasion. They wrote about this as if those audiences hadn't understood the difference between an actor playing a fascist and a real fascist: and they also expressed a kind of weary disappointment that the same had not happened at the Dorfman. Maybe, they seemed to suggest, this tells us something about the more sophisticated and reserved British theatre audience....

Well maybe. Or maybe it just tells us something about the audience of journalists and theatre management on press night. On the night I went, there was a lot of heckling and booing. Including some heckling in Portuguese. Some people walked out. But none of this was because the audience felt that the play was itself fascistic, or that the actor was a real fascist mouthpiece. Rather, it was because the play demanded that we participate - both theatrically and vocally - and that the passive audience move into a position of performance-making in public space, rather than simply receiving a completed work of art. It was a thrilling expression of liveness.

This understanding has made me think more about the process by which the play brought us to this place, looking at how sound and silence operate within the piece itself, extending from the stage into the entire theatre space and so (hopefully) to the society beyond. As far as I recall, the first voice we hear is the young male Catarina, who speaks directly to the audience - and what he speaks about is silence. Making him a kind of Chorus / Narrator means that we identify with him, watching the other characters through his eyes, hearing them through his ears. But what he tells us is that he has decided to be silent in his life: and for the rest of the play we hear very little from him by way of words. Some commentators have described him as an autistic character, but that misses the point that his silence is elective: he has chosen not to participate directly in the discourses around him. However, he does join in with the lines of Catarina 26 as she tries to deal with her moral dilemma, so drawing us into that process too. What's more, he is wearing headphones, and cues the music ("Musica"), so that the emotional sound world through which we perceive the scenes is also his world. It makes us very aware of our active presence, even as a silent audience, the contradition inherent in the decision to be silent, in political quietude. Decisions are being made that can control the emotional response to the action, and we feel ourselves implicated in those decisions.

There are many short scenes for two or three characters through the two hours that precede the final monologue: but none of those scenes have only those two or three characters on the stage. The picture at the top of this post is from an intense dialectical scene between Catarina 26 and her mother, in which both state their position on political murder, and both are right. But look at the table at Stage Right. Those two other characters are not in the scene - it's a private confrontation between two people. Those others are present as observers, as listeners, as audience. It's a motif that continues throughout. Even the fascist is present and silent from the very start of the play (long before that character is brought to the house by Catarina 26), and during his monologue, the family remains present on the stage. So the act of listening is constantly foregrounded, and the silence of the observer, the silence of the audience, is made inetgral to the play.

That's why the ending tips us into activity, into noise. We cannot remain silent, because silence has been proved inadequate by the very structure of the performance. We cannot remain a passive audience - we have to become actors - both in the sense of performing in the theatre, but also in the sense of becoming politically active. We are forced to acknowledge that we have a role to play in ensuring that the fascist cannot hold the stage.