One of the side issues in Scarborough at the Royal Court Upstairs is that of where to look. As the audience shares the same space — a dingy seaside B&B — as the actors, it’s hard not to notice how successfully one’s fellow voyeurs survive the ordeal of perching on dressers or squatting on side-tables.

On Press night the chap from Time Out, Robert Shore, sunk comfortably into the one easy chair while Michael Billington arranged himself on a window sill. Robert made himself more uncomfortable for the play’s second act — attaboy, Bob; we were asked to sit somewhere different by the stage manager — while Billington drew his second short straw, rump half spread on a sideboard.

When the rules of this arrangement are contravened it’s always unsettling. Nicholas de Jongh, who suffers from a slipped disc, insisted on a hard chair being provided for him, thus violating the show’s design. And when one actor’s agent rushed from the space because she felt sick or over-heated, we worried more about her state of health than the show’s outcome.

The most embarrassing exit I ever had to make was at the old Orange Tree, in the small square room above the Young’s pub. The seating was conventional but you were in the same space as the actors, and there was only one exit.

I was some way from that exit when I felt overcome with nausea. I had no choice but to cross the stage, mid-scene, and descend the stair. I achieved the street and promptly vomited over a stationary car.

I felt a lot better for the fact that the car was a very posh Volvo. I was young and poverty-stricken at the time, but still the proud owner of a second-hand Mini. I liked to imagine that the Volvo belonged to the local restaurateur who had given me food poisoning.

Promenade performances and site-specific shows allow for this vicarious thrill of space-sharing with actors. But it’s not really active participation. It’s a sort of intrusion on our part, more than an embrace from the performers, unless of course they acknowledge us.

When Joint Stock was launched, their first show was The Speakers by Heathcote Williams, focussing on the Hyde Park soap box orators, with the audience milling around them. It worked perfectly — until the oratory gave way to ordinary “scenes.”

If you want to create an air of absolute immersion then it has to be carried all the way through. I couldn’t help noticing that when a character in Scarborough went into the bathroom, he or she did not actually take down pants and sit on loo.

At least the domestic scale of the piece was appropriate to the setting. We’ve all enjoyed performance style productions in abandoned hotels and warehouses. Two of my favourites were Deborah Warner’s occupations of the old St Pancras Hotel and the Post Office Tower.

Northern Broadsides have been animating mills, carpet factories and even the auction ring at Skipton Market for years. The Arcola, too is an old carpet factory; hence its extraordinary atmosphere. The creative industrial life of a place lives on long after its sell-by date.

So there’s nothing new under the sun. But sometimes an old play can benefit, surprisingly well, from the treatment. One of the best Genet productions I ever saw was an Italian version of his hotel hostage play, Splendid’s, actually set in a private suite in the Hyatt Regency in Belgrade.

There was a drinks reception in the hotel bar area, then we all trooped up to the penthouse level in lifts and took our seats on sofas, cushions and low convenient pouffes. The event became a stylised horror show which sought our involvement but left us helpless to intervene. It really did seem to redefine then challenge the level of complicity expected of a concerned audience.

In those terms, the irruption of the planted actor in the stalls at The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, Peter Handke’s wordless drama of everyday coming and going in a town square at the National, is truly pathetic. The chap gets up and treads delicately over a few rows of seats and jumps on the stage, arms in the air.

If he’d started in the back row and made a slow, spectacular progress through the entire auditorium — in other words, earned his moment of disruptive triumph — his arrival on stage would have meant something. Not a lot, maybe, but a little more than it did. 
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.