It’s becoming almost déjà vu for theatre companies to want to throw off the constricting shackles of traditional theatre spaces and take over other “found” spaces to create their work in: there have been shows on the Edinburgh fringe that have taken place in public toilets and have even had the (necessarily tiny) audience seated in the back of a car as it was being driven around the city. Two of the best things I saw last year were Neil Bartlett productions that saw Genet’s The Maids played out in a backstairs room of a Brighton hotel, and even better, an adaptation of the Holocaust memoir The Piano staged in a hauntingly atmospheric Manchester museum space attic that is next to a disused railway platform and sidings, adding a frisson of recognition one now inevitably has, from endless movies, to how prisoners were transported to the camps.
Just last week I also saw a company called Angels in the Architecture take over the Royal Apartments at Kensington Palace to stage their version of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage in – the story of one romantically abandoned queen being played out in the one-time home of another, Diana, Princess of Wales. But quite apart from those subconscious (or maybe self-conscious) associations, it was of course part of the pleasure of the evening to take an intimate peek inside this palace.
So shows like this turn us into sightseers, as much about seeing the venue as they are about seeing the show.
In fact, while this show’s creators are adept at creating mood and atmosphere, it isn’t always easy to keep rack of the drama amidst the constant jostling of one’s fellow spectators or the general discomfort. And, at least on press night, there were far too many of us, so that it wasn’t always easy to see, or for the human traffic to be steered through the narrow doorways in sufficient time. Quite often the action started again before the entire audience had even arrived).
But seeing places we already think we know into unfamiliar new spaces is also becoming an increasingly regular intervention. Another of the best productions I saw all of last year was Mike Bartlett’s My Child, staged in an elongated version of a tube train carriage that was somehow installed in the Royal Court mainhouse. This retained none of the features of the venue it was contained in, so the jolting, wholesale surrender to a new environment was complete.
Ditto, at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Fiona Evans’ Scarborough transformed a former office at the Assembly Rooms, just inside the main entrance, into a meticulous recreation of a seaside bed and breakfast hotel room, into which the audience were crammed — and mostly stood — to watch a 45-minute drama unfolding about two people, a teacher and a 15-year-old pupil, who have spent the night there, turning us into eavesdroppers and voyeurs to their searing, intimate encounter.
Last night that show transferred to the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, again transformed into the hotel room. But in order to accommodate more of an audience – and give most of us a chance to sit, whether on a window ledge, the odd bureau, or the floor – the dimensions of the room were stretched, so though recognisably a B&B room, it was an unusually commodious one. (The play was also doubled in length with the same story played out twice — first with a female teacher and male student, then a male teacher and female student — so the seating was more necessary).
But we still got close up and personal with the action: at one point one of the actors leant over me to look out the window behind me just inches from my face. We, of course, are supposedly invisible to them; but I couldn’t help think last night, as a good proportion of the audience were fellow critics, just how unnerving it must have been for those actors to see us all at such close quarters. For the first act, with five of us sat beside each other on the window sill, we were a kind of shooting gallery; and I wondered, too, just how the actors must have felt as one senior critic sitting across the room kept “resting” his eyes, then waking up again and hurriedly scribbling a note each time it happened.
One of the things about shows like this, of course, is that they make you acutely aware not just of the actors but also of your fellow audience members – we also have a role to play. But at least we’re watching – or not – the same show. By contrast, the work of Punchdrunk – currently at BAC with The Masque of the Red Death – not only turns a one-time found space that long ago became an arts centre back into a found-space, but also sends audiences on individual journeys of their own. The communal experience of watching the same show at the same time in the same place is subverted so that the show is whatever you stumble upon – and where you choose to go with it.
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