It seems like only a couple of issues ago that I was commenting on the polarised debate about Three Kingdoms.  Well, to be honest it seems as if every couple of issues I’m commenting on one polarised debate or other… and indeed, “debate” doesn’t really cover it: it can come increasingly to seem like mere strident gainsaying –“’Tis!” – “’Tisn’t!” – “’Tis!” – “’Tisn’t!” etc ad nauseam.

There’s a touch of the same about Gatz, but less intense than the last outbreak.  Once again, however, there seems to be a slight assumption on the part of younger writers that those who like it less than them are suffering from a kind of geriatric neophobia, rather than considering the possibility that the oldies might have seen similar projects a number of times before and so be able to evaluate this one on a reasonably-equipped comparative basis.  It’s barely a dozen years, for instance, since I seemed to be spending every other weekend watching (and sometimes performing in) Ken and Daisy Campbell’s revivals of Neil Oram’s The Warp, a ten-play cycle which lasts 24 hours or so (individual instances of my 15 or so Warps clocked in anywhere between 22 and 29 hours depending on energy levels, whether or not an all-weekend rave was going on next door, how much the leading actor’s brain was melting… things like that).  Compared to that, a mere six hours of playing time, spread over eight hours from first to final curtain, and spent in conventional theatre seating, really is a walk in the park.


There is a substantive issue which divides critics with regard to Gatz, though, and it is one that does indeed link to the unusual length of the piece.  It has to do with the strategy of pacing a work which is so long that the length itself becomes a significant core factor, and how to draw an audience into that work.  There are, broadly speaking, two opposite approaches.  One is that the exceptional length authorises a more meditative view, both in staging and in viewing: that letting the piece unfold at a more gradual pace enables the viewer to take their own decisions as regards when, how and how far to engage with it… and that this incremental but informed approach may lead to a deeper engagement than is the case with more normal theatre works.  The second view is that, by buying a ticket for the whole work, a viewer has already made a decision, but that that decision includes a degree of trepidation, and that therefore it’s all the more important to begin explosively and keep the sparks flying throughout; in effect, grab the audience by the balls, and as the saying goes, their hearts and minds will follow.

It may be because my own grounding in durational work came through as maverick a theatre-maker as Ken Campbell that I incline, as he did (no, he didn’t incline – he loudly, forcefully and obscenely bloody well insisted), towards the latter view.  It’s a perspective that I was able to test to some degree a few years ago when Marina Abramovic curated a gallery-ful of durational pieces by a dozen or so performance artists.  It was clear that none of the pieces was going to be remotely blatant; there is perhaps a sense in performance-art circles that grabbing attention is vulgar and undignified for both artist and viewer.  Nevertheless, I noticed that I responded most positively to those pieces which allowed the spectator some status within the event of performance/viewing – that is, those which at least partly approached the central definitional element of theatre, namely that it is an event shared spatially and temporally by performer(s) and audience.


Now, I’m not for a moment saying that the Elevator Repair Service close their audience out of the event of Gatz; they certainly don’t.  But the relationship is one, figuratively and sometimes even literally, of winks and sidelong glances.  It seems to me not so much to draw us into the piece together with the actors, as to draw us together with them to stand on the outside and peer in at a work which is as Other to them as it is to us.  This may amount to a form of literary criticism (especially when the text in question is entirely unabridged, although that leaves a small mystery as to how they could knock a quarter of an hour off the running time at a stroke between the initial scheduling announcement and the press day itself); but it doesn’t – in that respect and to that degree, anyway – make theatre.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I saw Gatz.  I’m even glad I watched a lot of it (in the sense I’ve been ramblingly trying to explain here).  But the decision to watch was a decision, not a secondment or a seduction, and it was entirely my decision, and I feel that such a condition is less authentically theatrical.

Good Lord, I’m veering perilously close to suggesting that I resent being asked to think for myself in a theatre!
  
Written for Theatre Record.