A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar)

[cool theatre]  

Maybe a “We’re just mates talking like real mates”-performance style. Maybe there’s an aversion to character or ack-ting. Maybe a cool soundscape. Maybe drones. Maybe there’s a figure playing a cipher like MAN or WOMAN or GIRL. Maybe a formal conceit above the text. Maybe the formal conceit is based on a popular cultural model. Maybe that cultural model is very much not cool and not theatre. Maybe the title could be either oblique and long or oneword and oblique. Maybe (brackets). Maybe lots of dark. Maybe “character or performer?” akh-ting. Maybe very little plot. Maybe the plot doesn’t matter. Maybe a strobe. Maybe some quite jarring effects. Maybe sometimes it’s ugly. Maybe sometimes it’s unpleasant. Maybe a lot of hypothetical maybe-ing.

NO PROPS

I liked this play. In parts. I think it’s interesting and I enjoyed bits of it. It was actually a well-plotted play, well-structured sort of horror play. But. Well. I think that it thinks [by which I mean its makers think] that’s not enough – that a straightforward play wasn’t good enough– and I doubt that was the original impetus for the play happening, and I think that shows through.

The play is a sort-of noirish, sort-of crime narrative about a girl walking into a bar because there are blackouts in the world where she lives and she is looking for her friend who has gone missing, so she goes to a bar and attempts to find some stuff out. Within this there is a really good story that would hold up as a proper play. I’m certain of it.

But around this, there is a prologue and a lot of formal stuff that encourages us to believe that these people are ciphers: are, as the text actually states more “not a” than “a”. They are “the idea of a girl in school uniform”, not a character. Which is a very “cool theatre” trick. But also makes it very difficult when you are spending time with what are real, embodied people – not “ciphers” but people.

And the play never quite gets out of this bind – are these people real? are we supposed to care about them? is this working in the mode of a normal play? because it really feels like it is when it has successful plot twists and chatty chatty gags about biscuits. So, when at the end you remember all the ways in which it signalled itself differently – all the ways it seemed to be a noirish thriller and a shaggy dog story and not of the real world – then you maybe just feel that if it wanted to explore that, then it shouldn’t have found a way to sit so comfortably as an easy story to sum up. Because at the end, we find out that the girl was the grumpy barkeep’s sister and the story all clicks into place.

This feels a bit like what I talked about in my thoughts about Anyone’s Guess – the considerable interesting formal complications are not reinforced, but undermined and bluntened when the plot is so parsable and consumable. It feels like a group of people misunderstanding why cool theatre is cool – it is not free from ideology, it is not immanent, it is a choice and carries meaning – it only works if there is some reason for it and if Barrel Organ don’t figure out why their theatre needs to be cool, they might as well just make a musical.

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AGISU is on at The New Diorama Theatre until 17th February.