‘Total Man’ part of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Commissioned by Penned in the Margins and Mercy.
Our tour starts on Friday! I’ll be performing alongside Ross Sutherland, SJ Fowler, music group ‘Outfit’ and special guests. Further details HERE
‘Total Man’ is based on the writings of Stan Gooch, who, in his book The Paranormal, describes himself as ‘a reasonably well-endowed psychic’. Gooch was a sociologist/occultist/psychologist and the author of thirteen books including the epic ‘Total Man’. He was one of the first exponents of the ‘hybrid-origin’ theory of evolution. Most of his books explore the theory that humans are the result of cross-breeding between Cro-Magnum and Neanderthal. This research can be traced back to an experience Gooch had during a seance in 1958; he saw what looked like a Neanderthal man, crouching in the corner of the room ‘breathing heavily, as if nervous’.
I’ve been in touch with Dr. Brent Logan, who corresponded with Gooch in the last years of his life. Gooch’s final years (he died in 2010) were spent living in a rented caravan in Swansea, surviving on income support pension. Dr. Logan has sent me copies of the letters, which provide an insight into Gooch’s mind, his depression, and his commitment to his work. Here are some previously unpublished extracts. The first is from 1992:
I have now published well over a million words, often to critical acclaim by in themselves influential individuals. I have never made any money, and have lived much of the time in what most westerners would describe as poverty. Furthermore, I have signally failed to influence either the academic establishment or the world of alternative, new age thought. I am far too revolutionary for the former, and far too critical for the latter. Heigh ho.
2003:
The reversals and set-backs throughout my career have been continuous, relentless and un-remitting, as to some extent you already know. It all goes far beyond the reach of chance.
And later in 2009 finally some proof (underlining Gooch’s)
Recent discoveries of bones and skeletons in Spain have proved that Neanderthal and Cro-magnon did interbreed… When widely separated species of animal cross breed the offspring have two conflicting sets of instincts, with which they struggle to come to terms. And that’s why we’ve got left-wing political parties and right -wing parties. If lions evolved there would only be one political party – the lion party. If horses evolved there would only be one political party – the horse party. But we have two opposed political parties. (And as I’ve said in my books, if members of the labour party and members of the Conservative party were examined there would be: more left-handedness among the former; a greater incidence of the big toe being shorter than the other toes; shorter average height; less male baldness; larger cerebellum; more red-headedness, and so on and so on…)
Time to measure those toes….
‘Less’ male baldness, did you say?
Reading Stan Gooch’s books has been a trial. As soon as I’m able to follow his reasoning, he’ll matter of factly mention something like vampires, as if they prove his point. He draws on everything: psychology, sociology, archeology, mythology, the paranormal….which makes his writing fascinating, but also impossible. It’s easy to laugh at Gooch’s theories, but if I’m honest, I believe in fate, and I’ve experienced a few things that would deserve a chapter in his book The Paranormal. As Gooch said, the only proof of the inexplicable is personal experience. And even if you do experience something, it’s much easier to ignore it than to attempt an explanation. No wonder Gooch often found himself tangled in Ariadne’s web. Within his theories about the life of Neanderthals is an attempt to understand the contradictions of humankind.
Join me as I attempt to channel Gooch and dissect, reverse, layer and articulate his ideas and experiences:
The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is a play. Written on page. By me….
But now that we’ve gone through our development, rehearsal and production process, it has become a performance written in a space, with a creative team, and with you.
When my writing is occasionally published on a page it empties. As if the words have been stolen, type set, set in stone, an elegy, lost and concrete at the same time.
When I receive a book I have poems in, it sits for weeks before I can bear to look up my work. When I eventually bring myself to do it, I skim them really quickly and never return to them after that.
I hate the finality. I suppose that the act of reading brings them alive again. I suppose when someone reads them they can live. But I don’t believe mine do, because I write for voice and space and people. Words can’t move when they’re trapped on a page.
Perhaps having a play published is slightly different, as the reader knows it is really just the blue print. I’d like to be able to give my plays to other people to play with. But still, the play text becomes final. A final word, I don’t want to have a final word on anything.
In conversation, in performance, we constantly adjust, to other performers, to space, to audience, even when it’s a quiet one. We adjust our bodies, faces, voices, intonation…it’s a constant search for communication. Even when the audience isn’t asked to respond verbally, it’s never a one sided conversation.
During the last few performances of The Disappearance of Sadie Jones at the Bike Shed Theatre, and during discussions afterwards, I felt the work being taken by an audience, taken into their imagination, their bodies…and what they translated was often more beautiful than anything we worked out the play was about.
The work is given a new life by the viewer, it is born, something of it is taken away and it might transform, and grow and become something else. A performance is a gift that is given in different shaped pieces to anyone who wants to take it home with them.
The audience member is an artist (yup, I’ve no problem with that word), the audience member is the most interesting artist at this stage in the process, because they are new, they are questioning, taking in, helping a birth, assembling and assimilating the work within themselves. The audience brings the final stage of the creative process to the work. In the end they are the best dramaturgs. Audience members help us to see the work fresh, to see it from many perspectives, to witness that it is continuing to be written, every night. The writing is never finished.
Stephanie Greer playing Sadie Jones. Photos by Eileen and Chris Long
There are no women left, can’t win
carpeted halls, a place that smelt, women left
exhausted sandwiches spoke only to themselves.
There are some women it is true, small numbers,
bright colours, women are subject to its agitated
measures the women are left there explicitly
told them to calm down so poverty women left
no women left ‘sexless’ there is worse to come –
Wearing a pearl earring, the stage woman leaves
photographers maps and shovels, a swift belly rub
with a kind of wonky pride and a chunk of Wonga
contempt, no women there, edges glow red.
The women are left to dust or ice-cream;
There are no women left, I scream.
Alternative version without dodgy ice-cream we all scream rhyme:
There are no women left, can’t win
carpeted halls, a place that smelt, women left
exhausted sandwiches spoke only to themselves.
There are some women it is true, small numbers,
bright colours, women are subject to its agitated
measures the women are left there explicitly
told them to calm down so poverty women left
no women left ‘sexless’ there is worse to come –
Wearing a pearl earring, the stage woman leaves
photographers maps and shovels, a swift belly rub
with a kind of wonky pride and a chunk of Wonga
contempt, no women there, edges glow red.
The women are left to dust or ice-cream;
They like the word, but misunderstand its meaning.
Nobody got it but I knew what it was
got it but I knew what it was
it but I knew what it was
but I knew what it was
I knew what it was
knew what it was
what it was
it was
was
as
It is not easy to know whether this kind of language will work dramatically; it depends what you do with it. Often what on the page looks like something literary, something poetic, something undramatic, in fact only works in performance.
Strugglepause. Hold. Release. (Laurens, The Three Birds – stage direction)
My conversation with Laurens has made me wonder whether having to fight right from the beginning might be the best thing that can happen to someone who wants to stay in this industry right until the end.
- And the third one will probably be on libretto writing – should be published on the 28th Sept. Any thoughts on the topic, link to articles etc welcome.
Another disclaimer – I’m not a reviewer/critic/journalist. I don’t make any kind of notes when I’m watching. I have a selective memory and no desire or ability to sum things up with a synopsis. If I had any stars I’d give this five. But I don’t do that either, thankfully. I do however do spoilers. Maybe stop reading and go see it, then read this after if you’re still interested. From this website:
The work of Tadeusz Kantor reveals an archipelago of figures where the ‘zone of death’, as Kantor called it, has an unexpected neighbour – childhood. Encounters with both the imaginary and the real lead to moments of madness, to fear and joy, to euphoria and despair, and to a pulsating world seen by the Kabbalah master’s eyes. The Book of Splendour (Sefer ha-Zohar) is one of the key texts of Jewish mysticism. This beautiful text teaches us a lesson of understanding the world: the people and objects surrounding us, the global and intimate events which happen to us – they are all part of the Conversation between God and Man.
I have never read the Kabbalah or the Torah or any of the texts that this performance works with. I got the general gist of the texts, but not much more.
I also happen to be one of those odd people with no need for linear narrative or to understand the text or to really ‘understand’ anything. I’m quite happy just to watch it. So this is my experience of watching it.
At the beginning there was a voice behind us ‘yes I am here behind you, I am speaking this now’ he said (or words to that effect). I’ll call him the ‘concession to the British’. The voice that talks in a normal and friendly way, tells us not to worry. He tells us it will be hot (not that the play is hot, but that the room is hot). He warns ‘this is not stand up comedy this is sit down tragedy’ we laugh’ ‘that was the last time you will laugh’ he tells us.
fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency
There’s a kind of diagram projected on stage. The projection intersects with the stage design, scaffolding of many levels, ladders and hooks. The diagram is from the Kabbalah, there are discs and wheel shapes and spokes. The voice tells us that this is our map, this is how we will understand the performance (or words to that effect). He also says alternatively you can use the diagram to make a bicycle (we laugh again, so he was wrong, that wasn’t the last time we would laugh).
I expect things happened on stage at around this point. There was a little chorus of tacky white angels at one side of the stage – the only performers who spoke/sung in English. Later the woman angel screams, and screams, and screams, I can’t remember her words, but her screams were somehow picked up in the soundscape. Throughout the performance the recorded soundscape is an extension of the voices on stage. Which is bloody hard to do.
The video too, weaves within the stage design and the performers, it’s really very sophisticated; it echoes what happens on stage, it zooms in on faces, it appears to be live feed, but there are differences, it is the ghost version, or the real version, the nightmare reality, the reflection. On stage there is a woman in a white dress, on the video there is a woman in a white dress starving in a concentration camp. (There probably wasn’t – I’m totally winging it, this is what I mean by the montage, the narrative happening in the mind of the spectator)
Mirrors – the performers look into each other, mirror each other’s movements, they are doubles, echoes and memories. There’s a sense of nostalgia (go on then, there’s a Tarkovskian sense of Nostalgia).
In Grotowski’s Akropolis the performers in rags march around the stage, emaciated, ritualistic, those performers are here.
fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency
But in many ways this is beyond Grotowski, more sophisticated, more layered, the physicality more refined and detailed, the energy almost as raw, the use of voice more nuanced. There’s a woman in a red dress, a woman in a white dress, and there’s a painter, who is he? God, painting this world? The ghost of Kantor? The Kaballah Master? Again – echoes, images…. a child with a huge Jewish black fur hat.
fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency
The voice tells us that when the child imagines the devil, he sees him as a big black leather dog.
The child rides on a big black leather dog, an actor in a padded black leather dog suit, it’s a terrifying, brilliant image.
In Kantor’s theatre the dead return to take once again their seats on the school benches. They push aside the doubles of their childhood and drag them offstage. The class has been dead for years, the doubles are mannequins. (Jan Kott)
Dipping into Jan Kott’s essay Kantor, Memory, Memoire (as one does) – this theatre is described. The images of soldiers or prisoners, mannequins or doubles, memories or nightmare… this is a world of memory, imagination, dream, desires, the subconscious…births and dyings… a collective ghost of horrors…this is what our brains do when we are at the edge of our lives.
I’ll resurface to mention that the texts were mostly performed in Polish, with subtitles projected high up (I recommend sitting towards the back for this one as the staging also works on different levels. I mean, literally, as well as…) The ‘concession to the British’ – voice came and went during the performance, now and again grounding us with comments such as ‘and now a very famous Polish actor will perform a text in Russian’. – Or maybe in Polish. I read the subtitles for a while and then realised it wasn’t helping, and there was so much to ‘read’ on stage. It’s a large cast, there are stories and encounters and crazy images everywhere. But it isn’t fragmented. It isn’t chaotic. It is very carefully choreographed.
A woman performs sounds from the Hebrew alphabet. The sounds come from her body, rejected by her body, released from her gut, from her skin. A man has a hook for a head, a puppet has no head. A child speaks and an old man’s face watches. An old man speaks through a child’s face. A group of performers scuttle onto stage, strange creatures, masks strapped across the back of their heads, distorting their bodies.
I’m not saying it was perfect. The subtitle setup didn’t really work. I’d like to think about a way of using texts and words to lift something of the many meanings in the work out, some other way of working with language. I don’t know what the effect would be if I understood Polish; I got the sense the texts would be dense and abstract even if you did understand them. Or perhaps the words work best as sounds and just didn’t need any translating at all.
The ‘concession to the British’ helped us through the performance, but still a whole row left the night I was there.
It was enthralling. I guess it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t forgettable either. And I left the theatre feeling that something had shifted.
Last week I went back to Suffolk (where I grew up) to perform Opposition at Pulse Fringe Festival, The New Wolsey Theatre.
I was a bit nervous about taking Opposition to Pulse, because I tour it on my own now, and it’s a pretty tech-heavy show. But actually we finished our tech early. There was a great team. The sound was possibly the best it’s been. Also a great audience, sold out, or very nearly. And my parents got to see it at last (quite encouraging during the performance to be able to pick out their laughter). And I loved performing in a larger space than I can usually get –being able to project my voice and body properly. It’s a big show, my big idea – David – and we do big things – Barrack – best in big spaces, because we are at our best when we are boldest – Tony.
Finally….I managed to get the show filmed. So I’ve got rid of that old youtube clip from the preview a year ago as it was too long and I’ve re-developed the show since. Here’s my new trailer. Not perfect I know – it’s a DIY job – also…with a trailer….thought maybe I shouldn’t give away all the best bits …
…there are some great comments about the Pulse show online.
What’s on Stage came, got an amazing review from them in Edinburgh so was a little nervous but all very good, I’m chuffed (although with my name spelled wrong it weirdly makes me feel like it’s not me she is talking about…):
The whirlwind of energy which is Hanna Silva, a deliberately androgynous figure in a well-tailored business suit, grabs the audience’s attention from start to finish…Silva pours out her torrent of words often while performing an extremely energetic and acrobatic sort of obbligato to what is being said. If I was asked to name my top show from all those I’ve seen this year at Pulse, this would be a very strong contender.
Not considered suitable for under 16s or British mainstream theatre critics
I found Three Kingdoms a bit of a joyride. Sit forward on your seat in the first half, enjoy the laughs, then have a drink in the interval and just go with the second half. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to add to what is already out there in blogs, so I’m mostly going to quote them here in case it makes one more person see the work. There are only three nights left. Get a ticket!
About halfway through the first half of Three Kingdoms on Tuesday night, probably an hour and fifteen minutes in or so, I scrawled the following in my notebook:
“Stop everything. Storm the National Theatre. Tear down the Donmar Warehouse. Torch the Royal Court. Redact the entire history of the RSC and fetch me Trevor Nunn’s head on a plate.”
In retrospect, this was probably an over-reaction born in the heat of the moment. Not because it over-praises, but because it does the great work at those theatres a disservice. Let’s blame the adrenaline flooding my bloodstream. Let’s blame the breathlessness and the dizziness; the disbelief and the sheer fucking thrill. I was putty. I was windswept. I was in love. (Matt Trueman)
On the coming together of theatrical cultures. The collaboration between the writing and the direction, the way the staging adds meaning, depth, humour and detail to the writing:
First, the play was written for Sebastian Nübling. Simon Stephens has been developing a writing style that leaves space for the director. The published text is large, generous, sprawling; it asks to be intervened in, to be selected from, to be cut. It reminds me of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible, a play that would probably take 12 hours to perform and has never been performed in its entirety. But even in more conventional theatre, J B Priestley always deliberately overwrote his plays, on the understanding that a particular production would find its own path through the material, its own emphasis, its own interests and could therefore cut it accordingly. Hamlet is enormously long in its fullest textual variant and is almost always cut, without demur.
Second, and following from the previous thought, if Simon’s intention is to offer a text to be cut about, interpreted, selected from and collaborated with, Nübling has been doing to good old-fashioned British thing of respecting the playwright’s intentions.
Third, the production’s imagery is entirely drawn from the text….(Dan Rebellato)
I am extremely interested in this approach to writing that leaves room for collaboration, writing with space for the director. I think it might be the key to bringing theatre and playwriting into a new era.
On the problem of the representation of women….
Three Kingdoms
…I wonder if the reviewers, and viewers who dismiss the work on the grounds that it titillates and doesn’t question degradation of women are actually trying to find a way of criticising the work that avoids mentioning what really made them uncomfortable – the orgy scene, the naked men…You can buy dildos, strap ons and lubrication on the high street (I think). A 60yr old man can pick up a 20yr old girl in a London club. And that’s even before getting into the underground scene. But we can’t see it on a stage in our country? Are we so distanced from these things? Perhaps that’s one of the points. The girl trafficked in Estonia is the older British man’s young wife.
But interwoven with this criticism is the only reservation I have about the work – the lack of strong female characters…. to make theatre richer, to add poetry, to add power, to play against the male voices, to talk back. The muting of the female voice inside the deer mask was perhaps louder than if she were to suddenly speak, perhaps…. Or perhaps, within this non-naturalistic, non-realistic world, there is room for the other voice. But I didn’t find any female nudity gratuitous or any of those scenes titillating, there was little actual showing of female abuse, it was under the surface, perhaps that’s what made it more disturbing.
I think you’re right that a major problem is that there are too few women in the company and their roles are feebly underdeveloped; the requirements of the production are anyway not easily distinguished from the requirements of the men in the play who (bountifully) hate women. So in the end I guess my problem is that I have nothing left to work with, in extending to Stephens and Nübling some benefit of the doubt, other than whatever degree of cultural proximity permits me to assume that they are not themselves amused and titillated by the emotional and physical abuse of women by men. There is a problem with such assumptions, which is that they are wrong about a lot of people. What ultimately I find ticklish, to say the least, is this: if Three Kingdoms had been made by out-and-out misogynists, in what ways would it look or feel any different? (Chris Goode)
You know, I’m not sure if I can formulate it yet, but I think the work would look and feel very different if it had been made by misogynists. There was something about the porno scenes that were just… playful, irreverent, just a little bit real too. A little like Lars von Trier’s film The Idiots. But still, the main contribution to the work made by the women was their sparkly dresses doubling up as stage lights. All I can say is that as a woman I didn’t feel at all uncomfortable, the women on stage, while they had weak roles and little voice, they did have intelligent glints in their eyes, they did seem in control of their physicality. In contrast, I felt very uncomfortable and angry at the way Simon McBurney had his actor playing Margarita running naked, vacant, drunk in emotional ecstasy within a sea of clothed men for an extended section of Complicite’s The Master and the Margarita. That was far more disturbing, and yet Billington described it like this: ‘Sinéad Matthews’s Margarita, bravely naked for much of the second half, also conveys the inherent goodness of the devoted muse’
To reduce this work to its story is to reduce this work – and too often that is what reviews do. Andrew Haydon on meaning and making sense:
When a play takes this sort of jump outside the realms of the possible, it suddenly seems to become much more difficult to talk about. “What does that mean?” suggests itself as a question. Or even simply “What just happened there?” Are we meant to reconstruct our ideas of what happened through this new development? Is this sudden transformation intended as A Big Metaphor that we’re meant to Get? It is disorienting in all these ways. Being willing to allow that disorientation to be a part of the whole experience of the play feels crucial.
I suspect, in part, this might be what other critics have objected to: the fact that, on one level, the play does stop “making sense” altogether – although I would argue that this precise moment actually generates a lot new *senses*. But it’s not immediately pin-downable. And if someone believed their job was to pin down and explain, then this sort of thing is inevitably going to get on their wick.
I think what is most impacting about the work is to do with form, theatrical languages, and ways of making theatre: The colliding and collaboration of three different theatre making cultures, the British naturalism, ‘text-based’ writing and meaty acting, the German approach to directing work, Sebastian Nubling’s direction that pushes Stephen’s writing, plays against it, riffs with it, adds layers to it, the detail and precision in the direction, the craft, the physicality of the Estonian actors, the irreverence towards nudity, sex, pornography. The detail in the delivery of text, the range of acting styles and actors was fantastic, the character Steffen Dresner towering above the others, and the use of different languages on stage, the play with translation, the pop culture references and the humour was exhilarating. It was such a rich experience, the kind of theatre experience that doesn’t require intellectualisation, that it is hard to remember or describe some of the most fantastic moments. But I remember at one point, out of this crazy physicality, out of the chaos, emerged poetry. Not in the sense of poetic visual imagery (there was lots of that too), but literally… spoken, meaningful poetry…words that suddenly got to the heart.
I went to the theatre most nights while I was in Berlin for a few months, and I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years so I saw a lot there – most of it nowhere near this level of craft, direction and writing. But still, I haven’t seen enough work outside of this country to know whether writing, performance and direction this strong and entertaining has come together before. My sense is that while the elements within this work have been around in the theatre for years, because of its collision of different theatre making and writing cultures, the work truly is ground-breaking.
‘I’ve never thought of myself as avant-garde. If you run around a race-track and are a full circuit behind everyone else, then you are alone and appear to be first. Maybe that is what happened to me…’ Tatsumi Hijikata
It got me thinking about Butoh, a post-war Japanese avant-garde movement. - the character of the ‘Trickster’ particularly reminded me of images like these:
Michio Ito, Dancer, 1916
Tatsumi Hijikata (1950s)
Tatsumi Hijikata
Risto Kübar, who played the ‘Trickster’ is an astonishing actor who can go from the performance of failure seen in performers from Forced Entertainment as he struggles to sing, embarrassed as he realises he is being watched…to a strange all knowing mystical Shakesperian fool, travelling between worlds, with the physicality, flexibility, technique and detail of a supreme dancer, morphing into a cross dressing prostitute (with little dress and pull up white socks), evocative of butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno… and finally, at the end of the evening, which, by the way, is not a second too long….he creates one of the most poetic moments I’ve ever seen.
The mainstream theatre critics have put audiences off seeing this work, that is a serious crime against theatre and they should all be hung. (out to dry, I mean, of course)
Product and Furniture designer Ana-Maria Pasescu Stewart has constructed a light source that isn’t so traditional.
