The Worst Mistake

The worst mistake is to play the character….

That’s what Philippe Gaulier said when I asked him about the different ways that performers block themselves from clowning. Well, what he actually said was “the best”, but we all think he meant “the worst.” The stuff of performance is very hard to transmit in words anyway, let alone when the speaker and hearer don’t share a native language. When I write about what I think he said, there’s a lot of guesswork.

Not all actors can be clowns, I guess he said. Some are happy to play a ridiculous character, but they can’t bear to be ridiculous. To clown you have to find a part of yourself underneath the social persona- or maybe the conscious mind- that other people find funny. You have to enjoy having this hidden part of your self laughed at. Then you can build on it, refine it, magnify it. But you can’t fake it; the worst mistake is to play the character.

I saw people do what he told them, in the little, excruciating and valuable time we each had alone under his forensic gaze and everyone’s judgment, and snap into focus on the stage. I did it myself. Goaded to anger and told to be angry, I let loose a stream of Greek invective. He had others speak in their native language too-is an older physical identity tied to native language? I knew I was funny then, when everybody laughed as I cursed Gaulier and them with real anger. “You are not boring,” he said “but this charming character you play is very boring. Anger is good for your clown.” But you can’t spend all your time on stage in a towering rage, right? Wrath is so monolithic, so ponderous, and clowns are anything but ponderous; they’re all about the pleasure of the game. How can you use anger to find the game?

We devised a show when I was an undergraduate in which I played an almost-suave and vaguely sinister androgynous compère in a bowler hat. Whenever the hat fell off or was removed, I’d fly into a rage or howl in despair. It worked, it was funny. It worked in another way too. It gave me something to do with all the anger I’d accumulated over a then six-year relationship with an angry, controlling man. When that relationship ended, and I started studying clown, I was determined not to go there. Anger was too easy to get a laugh out of; too uncomfortable psychologically after so many years of being defined by it, one way or another.

And I tried, I really tried, to find something else, in workshop after workshop. But I learned something watching others, and it must be true of me, too. The red nose is a magnifying glass; it can only show what’s there. Censoring anger, all I found I could show was sadness, and shame. Clowns are shameless, of course. They live too much in the present for regrets, and the closest they get to acknowledging error is a rueful sort of “better luck next time” attitude to their mistakes. And despite the ‘crying clown’ cliché, they’re never mournful. A clown can howl with a toddler’s unrestrained sobs, but is easily distracted from them and never, ever goes around feeling sorry for herself. In workshop after workshop, I failed to get a laugh.

Group games and pair-work on complicity aside, clown exercises are just various ways of framing the injunction: Get out there and be funny for us-and don’t pretend. Many clown teachers use unkindness as a technique. I know there’s a whole philosophy about it, but I haven’t read up on it, I can only tell you my experience. In that experience, that cruelty mostly consists of telling you you’re not funny, brutally and often. The teacher’s words are only an expression of the audience’s restless silence, a magnifying glass, just like the nose. Brutal words were not new to me, I endured them, braced myself to endure them in every exercise, and with every exercise, I got less funny. There’s nothing funny about stoically enduring abuse. Maybe what that means is that my stoicism, and other attempts to be anything but angry is “ playing the character”. It’s not funny because it’s not the truth; the truth is I’m angry.

All of the people who teach clowning in this way tell you that it’s a technique, that they don’t enjoy being cruel to students. Many of these teachers will also tell you that the cruelest of all is Philippe Gaulier. I don’t buy it. Philippe is relentless in his critique, inspiring the audience to join him in extreme condemnations of your failure to be funny. He clearly enjoys the game of being extravagantly unkind, enjoys getting to kick all the sacred cows of social convention too, but I don’t think he was enjoying our suffering. I’ve met at least one clown teacher who clearly did.

There’s something childlike about a clown’s ignorant and unselfconscious enthusiasm for everything. That’s where I’m trying to get; to the joy of the game. I don’t know how I can get there through anger. I can’t pretend to be angry, that’s playing the character again, a boring angry character instead of my boring charming one. But how can you wear your real anger as a pair of clown shoes, how do you teach it new tricks? I don’t get it intellectually, and I don’t get it in my actor’s body. It just doesn’t make sense; but it seems there’s no denying it:

I am ridiculous when I am angry.

* * *

I’ve been very angry about a lot of things in the last few years. I’ve felt angry as a woman, as a citizen, as a human being, as a participant in online discussions, as an actor. Studying theatre at university, in my thirties, I became enraged by the assumption that only deliberate formal experimentation was artistically valid. A lot of people who work in or teach experimental theatre seem to look down on plays and acting, treating both narrative and pretense with contempt. I’m told this works both ways (both forms of prejudice are silly) but as someone who tried to learn to be an actor through courses beguiled by different modes of performance, it’s my own experience that makes me angry. I love narrative, I love pretending (and watching others pretend) and I got very short schrift for saying so. I find this infuriating both aesthetically and personally. Most of the time, I manage to keep a lid on that fury.

Recently, I was invited to be part of a discussion group about theatre convened by someone I have great respect for, full of people I like and admire, people I am humbled to be counted among. I was never asked to hang out with the cool kids when I was a teenager, but if I had been, I think it would have felt a little like this.

This week, in one of my first posts to that group, I unloaded all my suppressed fury on one member, whose only crime had been to dislike some texts I was working with and tell me so. You know how when some people post online they attach all the bitterness they’ve ever had around the subject, and lob it at anyone who disagrees with them? My ex did something similar in his frequent abusive episodes, he bundled up years of anger generated elsewhere, and threw it at me. Well, that’s what I did in this discussion group. It wasn’t as bad as what the ex used to do, or as the kind of stuff you get when you admit to being a feminist online, but it was in the same territory. I got invited to the cool kids' clubhouse, where I got drunk, punched one of them, and threw up on the floor. So much for keeping a lid on it.

I’m writing this to apologize, but also to understand. I can’t pretend to not be angry. When I do, when I play that character, what Gaulier called my “charming character” I am boring, it seems. I try to keep a lid on it, then it explodes like a faulty pressure cooker, making a mess and hurting people. How do you take all that steam and turn it into an engine instead, to take you and others to different places? How do you turn your anger into clown shoes and take it for a walk?

I don’t know, but after a week’s worth of Gaulier’s clown workshops I know there's only one place I can start:

I am ridiculous when I am angry.

13 Ideas I Want To Kill

This was my first attempt at some creative disruption of the State of the Arts Conference, though nowhere near my last. It was all part of the State of the Arts Flash Conference.

13 Ideas I Want To Kill

1. The artist (a word I hate) as lone oracle, dispensing their unique vision to those perceptive enough to appreciate it.

2. That fantasy equals escapism, and only overt social commentary is valid.

3. That we must reflect on our own culture, and not seek to understand different times and places.

4. That creation happens in the mind, not the body.

5. Self-expression.

6. That art is difficult, intellectual, different from anything else people do for pleasure.

7. That institutions are necessarily restrictive, and freelancing liberating.

8. That composition is more creative than execution.

9. Branding.

10. That the making of experiences is usefully comparable to the making of objects.

11. That what you do matters more than how you do it.

12. That concept matters more than skill and that the skills of artists are any different from the skills of cooks, or builders, or engineers.

13. The artist as entrepreneur.

Hypocrite voyeur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! : The Author

I walk into the Royal Exchange Studio with anticipation, and something close to smugness. I saw Tim Crouch’s England last year, and I expect to be discomfited, to be made intimate with horror. I am in the know. On one side of the narrow traverse, the front row is empty. I sit in it, feeling slightly superior, because I am the sort of person who is not afraid to sit in front rows. I am aware of Crouch opposite me, one row higher up, but don’t see the woman I know, even closer, until she smiles at me. I tell her I shouldn’t be surprised. I only know a couple of dozen people in Manchester, but they’re all the kind of people who would go to this, people who make theatre, teach it, study it. I am not surprised when two more of them walk in.

I keep my feet, my parka, my bag away from the narrow strip of stage, wondering how they will use such a narrow playing area. They won’t; we are the playing area. I look around, seeing two of the other actors quickly, by their poise. They look as if they know what’s going to happen next. I wonder which one is Chris Goode. I read his blog regularly, with ecstatic agreement, occasional bafflement, and an intellectual humility not usual to me; I have no idea what he looks like. I decide he’s the one with hair, there’s something in the face that says the mind behind it could have written the words I’ve read. I know there is a woman in the show, but I can’t decide which of the faces around me is hers, I scan them. There are several pretty, well-groomed women in the room. Women like that always look confident, knowing. They all look like perfomers, she could be any one of them.


* * * * *


Whatever you go to see, you bring yourself to it. This may be more true of The Author than of anything else I’ve seen. So much so, that I’m not sure a verb as passive in its implications as “to see” is the right one.

The self who is me brings a heightened awareness of this space, the different ways I’ve seen it arranged, the columns behind my seating bank and the double doors beyond, the staircase behind them leading to the dressing rooms. Did I not say I was an insider? Have I not performed here, all of twice?

I boast to myself of this, even as I resolve to set aside my superior knowledge, to be the audience that is needed (as if any of us could be anything else).

As it progresses, I am aware of the backstage tannoy, bringing fragments of dialogue and chant, faint as echoes, from The Bacchae in the main house. I try not to intellectualize this, but it is so very apposite. I remember that the horrors of the ancient Greek stage were spoken , not shown.


* * * * *


There is no impatience in the long space between the closing of the house doors and the first line spoken. There is curiosity in the open gazes all around, bright with the expectation of pleasure. The actor whose name I will learn is Vic makes friendly faces at me. He makes a corkscrew gesture with his finger, near his head. I think he’s saying something about my curls. I don’t know how to respond. I shrug, drop the contact.

Later, in another pause, I fish out my notebook. I have impressions to write down. I sit with it in my lap, unable to bring myself to stop looking at people long enough to write.


* * * * *


Chris speaks first, confidingly, as if we were all in the same position. I wonder if we are meant to believe that we are.

In the long, expectant pause afterwards, as we chat to each other in a way that feels spontaneous though we know it’s orchestrated, I sound out the girl next to me, to find out what she made of that first interjection. She says it makes you look at everyone in the audience differently, wondering who else might be in it. She says she thought I might be. Flattered (though I suspect it’s only my theatrically gaudy sweater that misleads her, and not the quality of my presence) I tell her I’m not. I point out Tim Crouch, and Vic, explain my reasoning. The woman behind us leans in to listen. Though I clock her curiosity, what must be her amusement, I am still surprised when, later, she turns out to be the fourth member of the cast.

The long pauses continue to unfold, in between the shaping, from the different angles, of the story of a fictional production, a fan’s experience of theatre, a writer’s immersion in a sensory deprivation tank.


* * * * *

As the listening becomes more difficult, I watch our faces change, become guarded, watchful. I see the glances away, at hands knotted in laps, at the floor. I promise myself I will not look away.

It’s the story about the Italian that gets me. It is Esther speaking it, and she is seated behind me. I have turned to watch her before, and will again, but this time I can’t look at her or anyone else. I don’t know that it’s the worst story. I know that it’s the story for which I can look only at the blue painted boards of the floor.

I am slightly shamed by this, and spend the rest of the show with as open a gaze as I can muster. By the end, only the actors are gazing back.


* * * * *

It is a supremely intelligent piece of work, this. Yes, like England, it’s at some level, about the complicity of the comfortable with horror. It goes further though, seeming to indict the very act of imagination. And if pretending is somehow morally suspect, isn’t pretense that skirts so close to autobiography the most untrustworthy of all?

All along, it creates reflections. What one character says or shows lingers, sharing the space with other things said. The juxtapositions become uncomfortable, then something is so cosy that we laugh in recognition, then the recognition is rendered more uncomfortable still.

The particular horror at the centre of this (if there is only one), no less central for coming near the end, is not the kind of horror the ancient Greeks shied from staging. It is a horror of commission only in the most distanced and indirect way. Mostly, it is a horror of conjuction; it brings together things that must not be brought together. So did The Author; it brought them together in the space and time we shared, in the social sphere that was all of us in that theatre, but most insidiously, in the space of each of our minds.

This is what it means to break taboo.

* * * * *

I have read a bit about it on the internet, and I am putting this on my blog. Virtual space, too is part of this. Though the show is technically minimal, all about shared presence and space, the ghost of the internet is here. It’s in the text, and the story, it’s also on my mind.

I’m here because I read Chris Goode’s blog, and what I read about this made me want to see it. I know that Hannah Nicklin’s written about it , having seen it recently. I did not read her piece, won't read it until after I've posted this, but I know the title. It says she didn’t clap.

When it’s over, neither do I. I think I would have done the same without knowing that title.

I do not seek out the people I know for an analytical chat. I linger for a while, near the sign that announces the price of the play text, but no-one appears to sell it to me, so I go.

It is not that I was horrified, or shamed. I was both, but not to the extent I was expecting, not viscerally. It is not either that I wanted to contemplate the beauty of it, though it was very beautiful. I needed to pick at it myself, at my own scab, to try to understand, or rather to pinpoint my several understandings.

I think it may be a masterpiece. I think it may be a dead end. I can’t imagine anyone going further down this road, or more intelligently.

If, as Le Corbusier said, a house is a machine for living, The Author is a machine for making the audience look at itself. It comes up to you in a frank and friendly way, takes you by the hand and leads you down pleasant paths to a dark place; a dark place with a mirror in it.

That pesky fourth wall

I have an aesthetic objection to much of the contemporary performance I see. Actually, I have several, one of them to the term “contemporary performance” itself; but I’ll save those for another day. I’ll start with one of the two things that really bug me; the relationship between performers and audience.

It is a truism parroted by graduates of every university theatre course that the fourth wall associated with “slice of life” drama, or more generally with naturalism, has been broken. The convention that staged action cannot make reference to the existence of the audience is often regarded, along with other conventions of the theatrical past such as the well-made-play and the notion of character, as toxic; part of the stultifying bourgeois respectability that the innovators of the last century were reacting against. I’m not going to take issue with that idea. Not yet, anyway.
Many companies have taken the implied injunction to acknowledge and interact with the audience to heart. Some do it quickly, almost casually, by a visual or textual reference, by walking out from among the seated viewers, or greeting them as they come in. For other companies, it’s becoming increasingly central to their work. Entire sections of shows are directly addressed to the audience, comments are solicited, volunteers asked for, challenges or affirmations issued. In some cases, Gob Squad’s Kitchen was the example I saw, audience volunteers take the place of the performers, following a set of commands that the company members issue over earphones.

This sort of thing, I am told, is fundamentally postmodern, a challenge to theatrical convention, a destabilization of the relationship between audience and performers. Now, I am not at all sure that challenge and destabilization are good things in and of themselves, but I’ll get back to that. I’m interested in experimentation, so I suppress the thoughts that stage magicians and hypnotists have been using audience volunteers for centuries, that textual asides predate Shakespeare, and that some of the companies that address audiences directly have been doing so for more than twenty years. I’ll look, instead, at how I, as an audience member, feel about such techniques: More often than not, I feel shut out. To the extent that I am invited to engage, I am invited to do so intellectually, or aesthetically : to question my assumptions, to take home the message, or to just experience, without analysing or identifying.

When I watch a show though, I don't want my primary engagement to be intellectual, or even aesthetic. I want it to be visceral; I want to feel deeply. When actors play characters, when they ignore my existence, I am drawn in to the imaginary world they create for my pleasure. I become involved emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, even to some extent physically. Because I am also an actor, I know that my involvement is something the performers are aware of. In the simplest terms, they know when to drag a moment out for my/our delectation, when to speed things up because they’re losing us. The ebb and flow of audience involvement is the life’s blood of the experience.This is true in almost all traditional performances, particularly true in things like pantomime, or theatrical improvisation, where audience participation is explicit. The performance changes, subtly or grossly, depending on audience reaction, what actors call “the feel of the house”.

In the newer audience interaction forms, it seems to me that the performers are often not particularly interested in pleasing us. If they wish to please anyone, it’s the tiny group of academics, programmers, journalists, and bureaucrats who are the source, directly or indirectly, of their funding. I understand how this dynamic works. If you can’t expect to so much as break even from ticket sales, of course the audience’s pleasure becomes less important to you than that of the people on whose approval you depend. Since the image of artist as rebel, of good art as something that makes people uncomfortable, is much treasured in these circles, they seek to please them by discomfiting the audience. The irony that their anti-establishment, difficult, work is funded by the establishment appears lost on them.

There’s more to it than that, though. I get the impression from a lot of this work that the companies in question simply don’t like the audience. They like each other, they like the work they’re making, but their affection doesn’t extend outward to encompass us, no matter how openly they appear to address us. They do not allow their audience to have any sway over them. They are not malleable; they set out to challenge or persuade, not to be challenged or persuaded. When they solicit participation, it changes nothing in the performance because the performance is designed to be unchangeable, remaining opaque to audience influence even as audience members take the place of the performers. When we interact, as prompted, we have become props, scenery, actors with no agency or responsibility for the success of the show. Paradoxically, much (not all) contemporary work that is concerned with audience participation disenfranchises the audience far more thoroughly than anyone from the much-maligned naturalist tradition ever managed.