stony ground, but not entirely

As an undergraduate student of French and Drama at an English university in the late 1970s, with a furrowed brow and a cigarette-fueled enthusiasm for Camus, Genet, Ionesco and above all Beckett, I possessed a much thumbed and annotated copy of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd. Esslin’s book became a point of reference and orientation for me at that time, mapping and distilling certain thematic and formal patterns of which I felt I had intuited something without being able to organise those feelings into anything resembling coherent thought. 

At an impressionable, receptive period it was foundational for me, offering a window into affective landscapes of theatre, as well as leading me towards a wide range of other texts and readings. Initially it also spawned a bunch of adjectives that provided a kind of shorthand for complex ‘worlds’ and structures of feeling, words to be tossed around in undergraduate seminars and conversations as if there was a knowing, nodding consensus as to what they actually meant: ‘Beckettian’, ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Pinteresque’ etc., as well as ‘absurdist’. 

Ultimately, and more productively, it helped seed a life-long interest in the ‘unlessenable least best worse' and ‘nohow on' of Beckett’s writings. The late Herbert Blau once located Beckett’s work as ‘the locus classicus of the problematic of the future' - and, on this hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1, as conflict continues unabated in various war zones around the world, Beckett will be a shadow companion in what follows:

‘Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed … But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!' (Vladimir in Waiting for Godot).

I still have that original copy of Esslin’s book, although until recently I had not opened its battered covers for many years. Almost forty years later, it is frankly disarming to revisit this text via the filter of my underlinings and scribbled notes, encountering these barely decipherable invitations to read and think as ‘someone else’ once read and thought. For these sub-Krapp marginalia offer the perspectives of a dimly remembered and prematurely world-weary nineteen year-old, his (my) unconvincing performance of hip Left Bank-ish anomie concretised in an omnipresent, decaying donkey jacket stuffed with papers and books (no carrots or pebbles), and an impenetrable micro-climatic pall of (‘Camusian’) smoke. 

I was clearly seduced and somehow affirmed by what I took - in my limited understanding of existentialism as a philosophical style, a grey cloak of ideas to be tossed over young shoulders and worn - to be revelatory representations of impossibility and inertia, of the inadequacies of reason, language and received regimes of the self, of disenchantment and meaninglessness in the face of mortality. In retrospect, I had little sense of the gravity and matter of such thoughts in and as lived experience.

Over the next few years, increasingly and joyously immersed in the chaotic, dissident explosion of new popular music at that time, and associated leftist politics, I came to read some of these plays as proto-‘punk’ manifestations, affectively rhythmed and charged mechanisms to prise the lid off the blind assumptions, repressed power-plays and dead-ends of naturalised middle-class ‘normality’ and conformity, education, culture, science-as-progress, entrepreneurship, meaningful action, the future. (One of my notes in the margins of Esslin’s book comically reads ‘Cf. Pistols?!’). In their defamiliarising shocks to thought and conventional aesthetic values, as much as in their pitch-black humour, these plays seemed to have a critical status politically and socially, both presenting lived situations as uncomfortable, uncanny image-worlds – how it is - and implicitly positing the possibility of and need to conceive of how it might be, otherwise, in a ‘world to come’. 

I began to realise that these were not exclusively essentialist metaphysical myths of nihilism and despair, scorched ahistorical outlines of the inevitability of the house burning down and total collapse through proliferation or entropic diminution, but also and at the same time abrasive, startling, excavatory calls to question and think and reimagine what Beckett in his short text ‘Enough’ characterised as ‘stony ground but not entirely’. Calls to make meaning where it apparently recedes and dissolves – in paradox, contradiction, oxymoron, double-bind, the uncanny, the im/possible, the Unnamable - or to learn how to live with not-meaning (1). Esslin suggested as much, perhaps, but somehow the insistent privileged framing of these plays, via a very particular conception of absurdity as anguished existential ontology, has served to insulate and defuse their potential critical, political charge.

So. Now. What/how one might live in relation to others. What/how one might be. What/how one might do. At this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us. Whether we like it or not. 

Extract from an essay on Beckett and ecology, 'The ruins of time (I've forgotten this before)', published in the autumn of 2015 as part of a collection reappraising Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd in the light of contemporary environmental concerns and perspectives
 

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(1) It was only much later that I came across Adorno’s negative dialectics and other critical perspectives contesting an ‘absence’ of meaning in Beckett: “Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970). See also Stanley Cavell on Endgame as: ‘not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian success – our inability not to mean what we are given to mean’ (in Must We Mean What We Say?, 1996).

festival

These notes form part of the tour programme for The Festival, the third part of Lone Twin Theatre's The Catastrophe Trilogy. It opened last week at the Barbican in London, and is currently on tour in England, then in Europe.
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‘Quelle catastrophe!’ Notes on the making of Lone Twin Theatre's The Festival

‘Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off’ (Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe, 1982)

The task of devising is to try to locate the shapes of what it is you think you’re looking for while often being largely in the dark as to exactly what that is. At the very beginning of work on The Festival, we have only the barest of hunches as to what we are after. We know that we will continue to explore narrative forms and structures in a simple traverse staging, a presentational and relational performance space of proximity, encounter and exchange. Beyond that, we have little more than a broad sense of wanting to generate a narrative set in the present, in counterpoint to the ‘pasts’ of Alice Bell and Daniel Hit By A Train.

In addition, we want to modulate the notion of ‘catastrophe’, and explore something much smaller on the sliding scale of catastrophic possibilities. Something more everyday, domestic, familial, something more intimate than cataclysmic. Perhaps just the sense of something missing, or someone missing out on something or someone: like the quiet pulse of a ‘hungry heart’. Gregg talks of the ambiguity of ‘tragic fun’, and of ‘songs of everyday life and how the silent catastrophe of love seeps into each hour …’

On one of the very first days in the studio, as we grope our way towards a beginning, there are just four words on the flip-chart - NO DEATH. NO INSTRUMENTS – like the seeds of some new version of Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto. So, we will orient ourselves towards the ever more spartan and pared back in a further refinement of the company’s goal to employ minimal means to maximal effect. Gregg describes Dennis Potter’s creation of song-based conventions for ‘saying complex things in simple forms’, then wonders aloud: if Alice Bell was a ‘line drawing’ and the greater complexity of Daniel was ‘coloured in’, then what would be a third form that had the ‘elegant simplicity of the natural?’ He suggests our task will be to ‘do what’s required, don’t art it up, then get out as cleanly as possible without the performance mode getting in the way’.

*****

As we work, we dance around the rhythms of the ordinary in our stories and in our lives: the weather forecast, the café, work, the kitchen table, traveling. At the same time we return again and again to instances of the extra-ordinary in the everyday: chance encounters, surprising visitations, as unforeseeable as Miles Davis’s sudden appearance with his band on the runway of an outback mining community in Rolf de Heer’s 1991 Australian film Dingo: “Hi, my name’s Billy Cross and I’d like to play for you …”

Throughout the work of Lone Twin Theatre, there has been a shared enthusiasm for music, song and dance, without any of us necessarily being ‘expert’ in these areas, and at times we have approached devising with the buoyant, untutored energies of a newly formed band. In our work on this new performance, songs in particular start to assume particular functions in the studio and in the emerging fictional world. Songs as meeting points, games, sites of imagination, desire, small epiphanic excursions and suspensions in the ongoingness of it all (an ‘interruption of the incessant’, Maurice Blanchot). Expressions of pleasures and fragile yearnings in the face of present absences. Fleeting mechanisms for reflection and immersive celebration. As with the solace of the radio in the kitchen or the car, songs can offer dreams and time machines in the everyday. As we proceed, the micro-festival of singing provides the soundtrack to our lives.

*****

As has so often been the case in Lone Twin Theatre’s approach to devising, our frames of reference in initial discussions are rooted in music, film and contemporary fiction (rather than, say, theatre). At one point early on in this devising process, for example, we look closely at some of Alice Munro’s remarkable stories. In part as structural and textural case studies and possible triggers for our own fictions: resonant ‘shapes’ and ‘feels’. In part for their grace-ful anatomizing of everyday lives, their repressed yearnings, confusions, compromises and mysteries.

In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro writes: “People’s lives were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum”. Elsewhere in an interview, Munro suggests: “The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple”.

Perhaps above all, at this early stage we are drawn to Munro’s temporal weave in some of these stories: the braiding of the time of lived experience with the unpredictable time of memory and its ‘embroideries’; the juxtaposition of the time of waiting, anticipation and imagination with the linear time of sequential events in the everyday, and the cyclical time of recurrence and return. Out of these delicate temporal architectures, Munro elaborates compassionate cartographies of processes of change.

Perhaps that’s what we’re after: a story that tracks small changes in understanding over time?

*****

In mathematics, ‘catastrophe theory’ attempts to model the dynamic systems at play when small shifts in circumstances of equilibrium provoke sudden changes in behaviour (e.g. the ‘tipping point’ in a landslide).

In classical tragedy, the ‘catastrophe’ is the final resolution or narrative unraveling that brings things to a close. Aristotle proposed a ruinous shock that would provoke terror and pity and enable the purgative effect of catharsis.

In Samuel Beckett’s short play Catastrophe, an irritable director conducts a final rehearsal of a minimalist play-within-the-play. On one level the ‘catastrophe’ here is the actor’s tiny act of defiance in the face of the authoritarian director. For at the very end of the play, when the director has left, he ruptures what has been imposed by the director (and by a mode of theatre) by looking up and out into the audience, and ‘the applause falters and dies’. He returns the audience’s gaze in what is now a space of encounter, and the audience is uncertain as to how to respond. So the ‘catastrophe’ seems to reside in part in a particular mode of theatre, in its coercive power relations and compromised economies of representation.

When Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, his wife Suzanne’s response after hearing the news by phone was: ‘Quelle catastrophe!’ She knew the changes this would entail for this most self-effacing and private of people; she knew that he wanted above all to be able ‘to be in his life’. I have always loved the honesty and compassion of this response to ‘success’. Reputedly, Beckett quickly dispersed the prize money amongst those of his friends most in need.

(Since their deaths in 1989, Sam and Suzanne have been buried together in the Montparnasse cemetery beneath a common gravestone that he had stipulated, with his characteristically mordant wit in the face of the inevitable catastrophe of mortality, could be ‘any colour, so long as it’s grey’).

As we proceed in rehearsals, the catastrophes in The Festival remain modest, related to small losses and a barely articulated sense of incompletion. The fiction hovers around a largely unspoken desire for ‘something more’ in a life that feels fine, but not quite ‘right’, ghosted by other imagined possibilities that seem to be somewhat compromised – and at the same time compromise one’s capacity fully to be where one is. So much is unspoken here; the dialogue often glosses over feeling, and moves on. Only occasionally do the emotions and perceptions that underlie these everyday exchanges breach the surface in small wishes and revelations. When they do emerge, they have a disarming economy and immediacy in this context, a joyous honesty that in itself may be both a micro–catastrophe and an illumination, an admission enabling integrative acceptance and change.

*****

Ultimately all three performances in this Catastrophe Trilogy present differing conceptions and experiences of catastrophe in stories of love, conflict, failure, loss and compromise. However the ‘catastrophic’ here, whether epic or intimate, social or domestic, is always contoured with hope and the possibility of change. From these invitational and open-ended structures emerge playfully minimalist pieces of music-theatre, in form and tone suggesting a kind of proto-Brecht discovered by intelligent children with their hearts a-pumping on their sleeves.

And as we come to an end of devising this final part in a cycle of performances, and the ‘things within things’ unfold endlessly, our work feels unfinishable. For other stories and new songs insistently bubble up and out, and it seems as though this disparate ‘band’ of fellow travelers and accomplices has only just begun …

Extracts from rehearsal journal during the devising of The Festival, January-February 2010
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The Catastrophe Trilogy is on tour from March to May 2010. The tour includes dates in the Barbican London (The Pit, as part of BITE), Huddersfield, Manchester, Aberystwyth, Dartington, Lancaster, Brussels (Kunsten Festival des Arts), and Utrecht (Festival ad Werf). The Festival will also be performed separately in Bath, Plymouth, Colchester, Barnsley, Bristol and Brighton.

For some reviews of The Catastrophe Trilogy, see here, here, here, and here

For further details of Lone Twin Theatre and the current tour, see the Lone Twin website here

For earlier posts on Lone Twin Theatre, see here and here

how it is

past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them - Samuel Beckett, How It Is

Photograph from inside Miroslaw Balka's How It Is, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, December 2009