ENGLAND
Traverse at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
August, 2007
****
Tim Crouch's original work – My Arm,
An Oak Tree and now this "play
for galleries" – begins to suggest that he is not really a
theatre-maker as such, but more a conceptual artist who works in the
medium of the performed word. Unfortunately, that label conjures up
connotations of abstruseness and solipsism which are far removed from
what Crouch does. Without pretension, seemingly almost without effort
and in a bare hour, his simple words and open, direct approach to the
audience encase amazingly complex groups of ideas that leave you musing
long afterwards.
Here he and co-performer Hannah Ringham of Shunt deliver intercut lines
from a single narrator-character which alternate discussion of the
character's art-dealer boyfriend and his wealth with a gradually
emerging account of the narrator's own heart disease. But there's more
to it than that. Because the performance takes place in a gallery (amid
an exhibition of photographic works by Alex Hartley), the visual
element is present even when it is absent from the staging. "Look,"
Crouch and Ringham keep saying: look at my flat in Southwark, look at
the view... it sounds like an account of an imaginary exhibition; the
one actually on the walls and in the space around them (to which they
also occasionally refer) does not clash or conflict with this imaginary
visual world so much as set up patterns of reverberation from which
more meanings emerge.
Add the themes of art as commerce, as commodity, and we are already in
complex territory; add Crouch's characteristic oblique approach to the
reality and illusion of performance, and more complex still: if we are
at once in Southwark and in Edinburgh, in a real and an imagined
gallery, if Crouch and Ringham are both a single character, where does
the "truth" of the account begin and end? And why that title England?
An answer to the latter emerges in a second act, more conventionally
staged though still in a gallery space. We infer (it is not explained)
that the narrator has now undergone a heart transplant, that it
occurred abroad (in an Islamic country, we gradually gather), and that
he (or she) has returned there to meet the widow of the man whose heart
was used in the operation. The semi-echo-y style of the first act
mutates into a set-up where one performer is the focus character, the
other an embassy official translating; we hear how long and detailed
speeches are distilled into single remarks, how ideas are boiled down,
and begin to realise that like this encounter, the whole piece – any
artwork – is literally a matter of interpretation.
When the matter of nationality emerges it bears no relation to crass
little-Englander stupidity, but more subtly enacts the matter of
cultural barriers to communication and understanding. Some are
physical: "Hard to see how they're feeling with just the eyes," says
the narrator, referring (we imagine) to the widow's niqab. Some are
intangible, as the widow's account of her husband's medical "murder"
following his injury in a bomb attack overruns with the narrator's
attempts to show gratitude by presenting her with a valuable work of
art. As one of them remarks, you wouldn't know from the outside what a
heart is like... whether it is the organ or the feeling core of a
person's identity.
Almost tangentially, Crouch gives the most compassionate and salient
account of difference I hope to see on a Fringe which this year is
awash with Middle-East-themed work. He also confirms himself as a
uniquely engaged collaborator with his audience's imagination and
thought processes. In many ways, this is nothing like theatre as we
usually understand it, and yet in crucial elements this is its very
essence.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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