Saturday 14 October 2017

Anyone's Guess How We Got Here

Two women are telling a story about two women travelling in a car in the midlands, towards a funeral, but first they will make a pitstop at one of their childhood homes – now abandoned. In the house they look for an object, an object that may be an absence or may be a body, memories, residues resurface – a story about a fox condenses as a story about a bailiff’s dog – but the object is not found, if they were ever searching at all: the house is then torn apart to its material value, ripped apart and the journey continues. The play is about debt.

There’s a beautiful question – in a play full of beautiful questions – where the performer describes the house being sold for half what they paid for it and asks “where does that value go?” It seems to me that the play really complicatedly revels in that question: if one follows a causal chain – chains, personal and invisible, through time – to its source, what does one find? Where does the transaction lead, where does debt/story exist as material fact? And the ultimate answer is, of course, nowhere.

I’ve been thinking about Mark Fisher a lot, as ever, and this play seemed steeped in his theoretical background, exploring the “eerie spectre of capital” through form – a tangled plot without a centre, a story that seems to infect itself and spiral in chaotic but sensually necessary directions – and it really affected me and got my brain whirring.

And what’s of course both to be praised and to be quibbled-over about this is that it is not – not really – Barrel Organ-y. I mean, of course, it is [what an idiotic thing to say *of course it is*] – it’s riddled with hyper-liveness, its never loud and showy, its almost always spare and careful and porous – but this is such a different form of a show, much grander and richer texturally than either SPTAV or Nothing, both of which were beautiful shows, but were pared back to their barest needs. Whereas here, one delights in the big-ness of the thing: the almost overbright dexterity of its language, its gaudy plenitude.

However, the corollary to my praise, is of course, a reticence, a disappointment: there was a moment it had me and lost me, when it sought to wrap up in a narrative bow the problematics it had addressed and tied in knots. The formal, phenomenologically felt idea of debt as absent actant, became explicated away, as the narrative served to just demonstrate narrativistically that, oh yeah, home repossession is really rubbish. The funeral story was endstopped as we learned that, yeah, the girl’s father was in debt and that’s the story. So, you stop unravelling, doubt and centre-less-ness cede to surety and narrative satisfaction.

And. Well, it felt a bit flat for me, after all that wrangling, that the show resolved to fixelf, when it had exerted so much of itself to a much more fruitful, polyvalent theoretical vein.

Ultimately, however, the performances are fantastic, the writing really piercing at its best, and the majority of the direction well-placed (I sometimes do wonder with this company if they do just need to think *a little* harder now if all their decisions aren’t predicated on “that’ll be cool, let’s do that” and have a greater rigour behind them – I’m looking at you feathers mercilessly nicked from the Yard – but that’s perhaps unfair).

But I basically think there’s a properly extraordinary show that makes no sense, glittering under the swaddling cloth of a show that makes far too much sense for its own good.

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Anyone’s Guess How We Got Here is on at the glorious CPT right now. Amber gave me a ticket despite the fact she had “never heard of me”, which was real nice.

P.S. I’m just going to pop some Fisher down here at the bottom because we all need more in our lives and if you haven’t read Weird and the Eerie, it’s a beautiful headscratcher that I think will open up Anyone’s Guess more than I can and have:

A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we? — but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity. 
The metaphysical scandal of capital brings us to the broader question of the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate: the agency of minerals and landscape for authors like Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, and the way that “we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was. The shudder here is the shudder of the eerie, not of the unheimlich.

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