Dirty Work: The Late Shift

Act one. There are two people onstage and there is a blogger in the audience who is excited. The blogger has been told good things about this show. The blogger feels this might be a rite of passage. The performers are wearing garish costumes. The blogger thinks this is a gesture. The blogger is unsure.

The performers are talking about a hypothetical show. The events do not happen. They are all dramatic. The show is not. That appears to be the point. The performers keep talking. They talk more. They describe lots of dramatic, shocking events. People titter. This is probably clever and funny. This will become clear to the blogger, the blogger thinks. There is another woman dressed all in black who seemingly randomly puts a record on sometimes. This will become profound, the blogger thinks. The male performer looks like my uncle’s friend, the blogger thinks. He also talks like my uncle’s friend. His performance style is like someone who believes everything he is saying is intensely important and deserving of attention, just like my uncle’s friend, the blogger thinks. Why is he shrugging on every line? The blogger finds this grating. The blogger continues finding this grating and is unsure if this is the point. Time passes. Oh, and then some more music plays. The blogger continues to be annoyed, somewhat predictably.

End of Act One.

An interval is described. There is not an interval. An interval would be a blessing. An interval would allow you to leave. The blogger doesn’t feel complicit or forced to stay. The blogger’s annoyance is not productive. The blogger feels bored.

Act Two. The repetition of the show not happening but being described is referenced. People are laughing at jokes that would have been funny had the last twenty years not happened, had Breach and Barrel Organ and Chris Thorpe not happened, this performance style might be clever or funny, but, like a rerun of a dated episode of Friends shown to someone who didn’t watch Friends, the jokes aren’t funny. The blogger considers heckling. The blogger spends the next twenty minutes considering funny heckles. The blogger plans a tweet for later, something about how someone should have just given these performers a copy of Offending the Audience. The blogger makes themselves laugh. The show is still not making the blogger laugh but the people still keep laughing for no reason. The blogger’s uncle’s friend keeps shrugging and occasionally gurning at the audience. The female performer does a fairly good monologue about different forms of transformation. This is quite exciting. The blogger thinks they are getting somewhere. This seems to explain what the show thinks it is doing. You think how good a performer she is. Then you remember how boring the whole thing is and she sits down and the man is shrugging again. End of Act Two.

After the show. Magicians maybe are described. Stand-up comedy. Some jokes about political theatre, and somewhat predictably Trump. Of course they think that's very ironic and funny. Lots of other stuff. Blah blah blah blah blah. Interminable blah. The performers continue to think this is terribly important. The blogger watches the audience and is confused why they are all smiling. Perhaps they are all press or all huge Forced Entertainment fans or perhaps the blogger is stupid, the blogger thinks. Perhaps the blogger is just not getting it? Perhaps they need to be working harder? The male performer shrugs off yet another boring staid image in the style of someone remembering a particularly funny time they saw Nina Abramovic at a party and the blogger is completely done. The blogger really thinks about leaving. The blogger is so hopeful for something, anything to make this not a waste of time. The blogger is so fucking glad they didn't bring their mum, she does not need more persuading that theatre is a pretentious waste of time, the blogger thinks. The blogger is strikingly aware that they spent money on this. This annoys the blogger no end. The blogger gets actively annoyed thinking about who this is for. The blogger thinks about all the brilliant work going unproduced or unseen that could take the place of this waste of everyone’s time. The blogger is more angry than they have been in any show in months. Oh, the lights are dimming slowly. This is some blunt and ill-formed gesture about the end of the world being like when the lights go down. The blogger thinks how obscene it is to create such an anti-theatrical object. The blogger finally seizes the moment: the blogger throws a shoe, the stage explodes, the world explodes, neoliberal culture is destroyed, the theatre becomes a time machine, the blogger steps into the time machine, the time machine takes the blogger back three months. The blogger is buying a ticket but changes their mind. The blogger is very happy. The lights go down completely. The two performers emerge from the darkness to check the pulse of the blogger and pronounce them dead. They record the death and rob the corpse and spend the money in the pub with all their fans. The blogger’s corpse is found in a dark room. In their blue hand, underlined, is a review by Lyn Gardner which is incisive and beautifully argued and completely completely and utterly not in accordance with anything the blogger experienced. The dead blogger turns into some words. The words remember they don’t have an uncle. The words give up too.

End.


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Anatomy of a Suicide

This play is a masterpiece. That’s that. I will take no opinion to the contrary. I will defend it to the ends of the earth. And it’s only the second most hyperbolic thing I will say about Alice Birch in the coming paragraphs.

*There’s very little I can say about the play without spoiling the plot, so I’d really, in this very special case, recommend just seeing or reading the thing before reading this. Seriously. I don’t want to inflect any of it with what I have to say. *

So.

Its narrative is fairly uncomplicated in lots of ways, which makes its unravelling remaining compelling all the more extraordinary: three timescales, Carol, whom we see in the 1970s, is mother to Anna, whom we see in the 1990s, who is mother to Bonnie, fifteen years in the future.

The play explores the way in which their lives resonate with each other. Scenes across time periods play out in parallel stage time and create echoes, linguistic and dramatic, of each other. Carol and Anna both commit suicide (we know this within the first half an hour (and the title, really) as we hear from successive children that their mothers died in the house in which they are staging) and the play leads us through burgeoning relationships, to bearing children, to the struggle against a desire to die.

It seemed to me to deal sensitively and complicatedly with the emotional labours of woman- and mother-hood. So many scenes play out these female characters being asked for too much (often by men) or being bothered when they needed peace or being harangued when they needed support. The women are constantly suffering as they fail to do what is expected of them: be caring towards children, being emotionally available to their partners and children, wanting to rear children, not taking heroine, not kissing women, children.

“Anatomy” is precise in its description. There are so many causes at play and as they echo through these parallel storylines, the complications expand away from each other – inherited trauma, structural oppression, postnatal depression, the anguish of having to reproduce – all echo and reverberate through each moment. Scenes push up against each other and lines in one scene seem to answer questions you have of another, lines echo an hour later and corrode the integrity of your memory of that past event. The past – I’m going to just hammer this home – literally infects the way you understand the present and the future.

Here’s the hyperbole. So, I was thinking as I sat there gawping afterwards that Birch is, I think, as close as we have to a contemporary Shakespeare. And I really mean it. What I mean by this is that the play’s first scenes are a wash: you feel lost and unable to parse the language, it seems far too much to deal with [it is – her brain is extraordinary] and you really expect it to let up. But as the play progresses, it in fact increases in density but, and here’s the Shakespeare bit, it teaches you its language. You start to go with it, even as you are aware that its going far too fast for you, o’erleaping itself and falling on th’other.

The play is so dense I think it might actually be cleverer than I’m imagining. It is richer and more polyvalent and elaborate than any contemporary play I’ve ever seen. It makes Oil, look like a kid’s show.

This runs in a line of Birch’s plays – and 21st century playwrights generally now I think about it, McMillan’s Lungs and Thorne’s Sugar Water being the two that immediately spring to mind –  that deal with the terrors of having children, the recklessness of that act, but this play seems the closest to finding its way to a really difficult and potentially horrible conclusion. The happy-ending for these people is sterilisation, to cut off the branch of their line to reduce suffering. The play neither censures nor supports this conclusion. But Birch allows us to glimpse the sketchpad of her most complex and knotty interrogation yet.

The production, directed by Katie Mitchell, is very... well, very Katie Mitchell. The cast are stellar: every beat seemed so carefully controlled I can scarcely believe Katie wasn’t in the flies pulling strings. And scene changes, in which the three women are not allowed to leave the stage but are undressed and dressed in front of us, hammered home the ways in which these women’s bodies are undergoing constant control within the world of the play. The sound design by Melanie Wilson was evocative and blurry and great.

But. But but. The columns. So, the play’s form in the text is three columns spaced out, in the way Birch has utilised before in other texts but never to this degree. And the design by Alex Eales just seemingly transposes this onstage. There are three “tunnels”, variably lit, so that the stage is split into three time-zones and becomes immediately legible from left to right. Which really helps us read what is, admittedly, a tricky play.

But the play is so rich, so varied and so deft at the textual level, the flatness of this presentation (particularly as the stage’s depth was limited) and the greyness of Mitchell’s concrete aesthetic, made the whole thing feel less claustrophobic, more hemmed-in. I wonder what is gained by this form, and what lost by not being able to vary the relationship between the scenes in space, not being able to privilege vision of one over another, not being able to push one forward, pull one ahead, not be able to place two close to each other and one far away? Which isn’t a criticism – I wouldn’t criticise Katie not on your nelly –  more a hope that this play gets another production that frees it up and sees how far one can complicate the play’s legibility. Just to prove Katie right and me wrong. And the reveal at the end sort of assuaged my concerns over all of this: the most beautiful light I’ve ever seen, really.

I’ve read a couple of review that talk about this play being tough or depressing. I honestly didn’t feel either. It’s difficult, that’s for sure, but it has heart and guts and so so so so much to say and do in your minds. Cognitive, dramatic, and gutsy satisfaction are very very rare, for me at least. This play is about as satisfying as theatre gets. I walked out moved to tears but competely enraptured and delighted that it exists and that I live at the same time as Alice Birch.*

Now imagine all the hyperbole in the world, it’s that. I can’t tell you enough how much you need to see this.

*I’ve seriously thought in the past about offering to do rubbish errands for her, so that she could just spend more time writing. I wonder whether someone did that for Bill Shakes? I’d like to think I would have done. God, I need to get a hobby.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.