[insert slogan here]

[insert slogan here]

This show is exceptionally difficult to write about. It feels enormous and sticky and tentative and bold and like butting up against someone’s shoulder in the street and you’re never quite sure if you pushed them or they you. 

It’s about advertising (why anything needs to be “about” anything at this stage is beyond me but whatever) and more specifically a Volvo advert that Sam saw as a child and is going to recreate for us. The show is made up of these beautiful, bright, multimedia passages, where Sam will make an “advert” in your mind, building it out of what seem to be these inchoate impressions of someone on holiday, of someone at a party, of someone falling in love.

Then in between these sections, Sam will build a car out of boxes and very DIY stuff onstage with an audience member while talking to them about the feeling of being cool and falling in love. That’s its sort of complex structure, but the mud of the thing feels very different.

I saw the show twice in under a week. Both times it was raining outside and I was slightly damp because Edinburgh is preternaturally damp, even when sunny. And it did this strange thing to me that I think is a hallmark of truly great work which is that it felt like a different show, despite being functionally exactly the same: the words Sam spoke were identical, the video and sound presumably made of the same light and frequencies, but it hit different bits of me and invited different bits of me to work.

THE FIRST TIME

I thought.

I thought about advertising and its structures. I thought about capitalism.
I thought about what I want and why. I thought about synthetic feeling. I thought about sensory overload and anhedonia. I thought about the way a tiny fragile human can seem so very small and their voice so very tiny and the way a haze and some side-lighting can make a mate look like a rockstar. I thought about love. I thought about roughness.

THE SECOND TIME

I felt.

I felt sad: so overwhelmingly sad and lost. I felt cheated out of my very desire and I felt that desire to be both being massaged and eased and encouraged and deconstructed. I felt the insincere structures of seeming seen, in the act of sincerely being seen. I felt the Baudrillard quote that was on the free sheet. I felt simultaneously like this was beautiful and cruel; that it was unfair to build this thing and invite people in and then demonstrate that it’s all smoke and mirrors. I felt a deep, warm affection for my friend Sam and I also felt like my wants were all surface, all preconditioned, that the inchoate, bubbling want is really a simulacrum of the will to consume.

I think it’s a really startling object. I hope more people get the chance to experience it. At times it feels like it is teetering on the point of collapse – even just technically, for a small company with limited means to stretch to something as grandiose and demanding as this is no mean feat.

It will stay with me for a while. 

–

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.

-->

Status or The Silken Tent

-->

Hi. I’ve not written in a while – been too busy, been too stressed. But Status felt like a return to somewhere bright and airy I haven’t been in a while and it made me want to talk about it. Because it’s a really incredible piece of work, though not in exactly the way I expected.

It’s made by Chris Thorpe and is broadly about a guy called Chris and the story of the impact of Brexit on the way he feels about his status as a British (or more specifically English) person. It’s a really thrilling piece of storytelling, captivating without working too hard, and very much being on its own terms. It goes to strange places, travelling across the world and back again, pulling the mind through space with you, without seeming to finely pin down exactly the where of the places. Everywhere seems slightly like a version of a place you might have read rather than seen, or rather seen in postcards but never visited.

There’s a projection of lines that run across a screen, sometimes they feel like lines on a map, sometimes like mountains drawn in space, sometimes they are neon strips, sometimes the horizon, sometimes they look like the strings of a guitar but none of these are done in such a way as to make you think “well, that’s that”.

All of it is I guess the sort of wide-ranging potentially aimless work that I love Chris Thorpe for: what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-be-thinking theatre that is never going to let you off the hook and just sit back and assume that it’s what you think it is. I suppose mercurial is maybe the word for that. Though, also sort of not.

But there’s also music in the show. Bits where Chris just sort of sings songs with an electric guitar about how he feels about Brexit and maps and England and pulling England out of himself and himself out of England, about wanting to be no longer of the place that you are of but being aware that that is exactly the privilege that makes you of. Because we do not like the Englishness of Nigel Farage, we do not get to no longer be English.

And what the music does is makes you feel rather than think. This is a feelings show rather than a thought one. Obviously, the best shows are think and feel but I think what the music does here is to give you space to really plunge into the feeling of it, to feel with the room in a place that is not quite conscious, that is bodily and deep – which is a real feat. It reminded me of my favourite moments in Ponyboy vs. and in Three Sisters and then in [insert slogan here], which I actually saw after but think has resonances.

I mean, of course I like it. I love Chris Thorpe. But I loved the seriousness of Status – there are jokes, but it's quite a joke-free thing, which is weird, particularly at the Fringe and I guess that made it feel like theatre that takes theatre seriously; seriously in the way they talk about theatre in The Writer, like the Greeks screaming and wailing and resolving the world. This feels like that kind of work. 

I was also struck by the fact that Chris Thorpe is a fucking great performer. Startlingly good. Like, I really like all the kids mucking about with their thoughts at the Fringe – they are all really trying and some of them are so laudable and good – but he’s just at another level. He’s fucking smart and fucking good at holding an audience and fucking brilliant and knowing how to use rhythm to lead an audience without feeling the force of the following. 

Which makes me think about The Silken Tent, which in turn makes me think about nationhood and personhood, and I think I’ll just leave you with that: maybe you can think about that too and see whether The Silken Tent is about nationhood after all, because I guess just like Status I’m not sure I understood exactly all the things it is attaching itself to in my brain but I think it’s such a remarkable object:

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when the sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 
And its supporting central cedar pole, 
That is its pinnacle to heavenward 
And signifies the sureness of the soul, 
Seems to owe naught to any single cord, 
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To every thing on earth the compass round, 
And only by one's going slightly taut 
In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

–


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.