Mick Gordon’s company On Theatre
continues to stimulate and provoke with its dramatic essays-
cum-parables on divers aspects of
what it is to be human. The topic of emotion takes the company closer
to the territory of its 2005 debut
On
Ego (written in collaboration, like this piece, with
neuropsychologist Paul Broks), but it feels (ha!) rather more uncertain.
The opening moments of Gordon’s production, parodying the
Star Trek title sequence, suggest
that we may be about to tread the path of Spock and consider a
Vulcan-style unemotionalism. In fact, we shift to a more modish take on
the matter, that of cognitive behavioural therapy. Stephen, a CBT
practitioner, is writing a lecture – thus enabling actor James Wilby to
deliver material straight to us – as well as dealing with his Aspergic
son Mark and his actress daughter’s best friend, puppeteer Anna. The
fundamental question of the piece is “Are we just the puppets of our
emotions?”, but its dramatic realisation is rather overdone as
bunraku-style figures come to stand
as surrogates for Mark, for Anna’s lost unborn child, for Stephen in
his professionally unethical feelings towards Anna and so on.
Gordon and Broks enjoy provoking emotional knee-jerks from us,
particularly various shades of disgust, before interrogating us on the
extent to which our responses are reasoned as opposed to reflexively
felt. It’s a useful way of working, since the basic personifications
feel (that word again) a little too schematic: one person, Mark, who
does not understand or properly experience emotion; one, Anna, who is
prey to bursts of uncontrollable feeling for reasons unknown to her;
one, Stephen’s daughter Lucy, whose job as an actor is to fake emotion
but who feels too much offstage; and Stephen. In his person the writers
try to be thoughtful yet moderate, by suggesting that CBT is one of the
most practical ways we currently have to approach such matters but also
refraining from giving the shrink all the answers. It is a more
successful attempt to square this circle than was the doctrinaire
atheism of the protagonist of the company’s last work
On Religion, but it doesn’t quite
work this time either. Still, the point is not to pretend to have
answers, but to identify and animate the questions, and in that the
company succeed.
Written for the Financial
Times.