Live and Electric; Mystery and Mystique

A doctor with a great big round machine lay me on my guts and stuck a needle in my spine. It still hurts. This will be a serious post.

For the first half of my career, I wanted theatre in a box: formal plays on a normal stage with an audience that understood the rules, but by the time that the Hansel and Gretel tour had finished early in the ‘90s I had had a gutful of directors that chose to exploit personality politics rather than develop relationships, and for whom tech was more important than the audience. Worse, I was sick of paying them to do it.

I was already familiar with the theories of ‘Poor Theatre.’ Within them I detected a promise for an art that retained the human as its measure, rather than obliterating the human as a nuisance. I was then in my thirties, but still the best theatre I had ever seen was from a touring company that had reached the Murchison in the early ‘70s, and that presented a three-hander account of the life of C.Y. O’Connor. I was twelve at the time. In over half my lifetime to date, I had seen nothing to approach it for directness, humanity and authenticity. For each of the three actors, the audience was a group of people with every one of whom a relationship was possible; the performance was a telling of the truth, and the measure of that truth was to be found in the depth of the relationships that were being formed moment by moment. There were no props, no special effects and no costumes. It was spring, so the days were hot and the actors (2 men and a woman) wore t-shirts and baggy pants. Their feet were bare and their hair was long and loose. They had only themselves, their voices, their story and us. Still, today, I admire them for what they did.

A few years later I watched a similarly good piece of work. This time, a man and a woman, a bucket and a stool made up the whole company. The costumes were shorts and t-shirts - this was high summer in Perth - and the story was no more than a struggle to occupy the stool. The loser then filled the bucket with water and threw it over the winner, who fell off the stool and started the cycle again. Apart from the wet t-shirt component, this was once more a theatre of only body, voice, story and audience. I was then nineteen. I am now fifty. Nothing I have ever seen in the professional theatre beats these two simple shows. None of it was theatre in a box.

By 1992, I began to turn the company toward this stye of performance, but it took a further ten years to wean myself away from the glamour and crutches of lighting, music,  costumes and tricks. Even in my most direct performances, I was uncomfortable without a musician to keep up my confidence. It was not, in fact, until I had to face the need to live out of a small car that I was able to finally match the daring of those two much earlier troupes.

I have often been accused of building a mystique of ‘Live,’ usually attracting, at the same time, the complaint that I strip mystery from theatre. Neither is fair. There is no mystique to Live. Live is a real thing, a real experience: real and irreplaceable people make up the audience. It is their responses to their experience that gives Live its individuality. Live is not the same thing as simply being in the same room as the performers. It is an interaction between the performers and the audience. In the hands of a good technician, lighting and sound and music (and so on) are an integral part of this interaction. Good technicians know how to busk. Really good technicians can busk so well that they do not need any performer at all, only than themselves. My interests, however, remain with body-and-voice performance.

There is no mystique to Live, but there is a mystery to it. I mean this theologically - as Geoffrey Rush’s character in Shakespeare in Love means it. Live is like being in love or in the depths of hatred; it is like trusting a mate or standing alone in utter self-sufficiency; it is like cooking for a family, like reading a favourite book or like helping a stranger start their car. Put simply, you have to be there.

I have resisted electronic transcriptions of my work because they substitute a mystique for mystery. They fake Live. You don’t have to be there. Despite the fact that I am forced now to turn my attention to electric media - to the electric stage - I still believe that this objection has force. If the electric stage is to be meaningful, rather than a simple gimmick, then it must be capable of work that is innate to it, that is indigenous to it and that cannot also occupy a live stage except with diminished authority. What this might mean in real terms, in practical terms, is still unclear (to me, at least).

I am already satisfied that electric performances that originate in folk-theatre are possible. The later Lomax recordings of Leadbelly, for example, stand as a clear analogy and as proof of concept. There may be room for debate that such work is truly indigenous to the medium, but there can be no room for dispute that it is dependent upon the medium.

At first blush, it may seem that the electric stage - being in this case aural - must have close affinities with the Theatre for the Blind. I do not believe that these affinities, if they exist, are actually close at all.

Barry Humphries commonly refers to the unity that arises in an audience - a sense of the mass of people responding and thinking and feeling as one. He likens this to the behaviour of a congregation in church. Some performers rate their success upon the extent to which they can arouse this unification into a ‘mob.’ Jim Morrison, in particular, was deeply committed to this model of performance.

Once, when I was playing in Dumbleyung, I discovered that my audience was not responding as one, but rather had atomised. Each individual was deeply committed to their response to me and to the material I was performing (in this case The Gospel of Mark), but they were not aligned in their responses. Some were breathless, some laughed throughout, some wept without cease, some zoomed in and out, as it were, upon particular lines. There was no unity across the group. Rather, it was a performance of extreme intimacy. For everyone in the room, it was a gathering of only two - myself and one other. I have encountered this more often than not in my performances, and have come to prefer it to those houses of five hundred or more where intimacy can be simulated but never actually achieved.

This real intimacy is possible with the electric stage. More than anything else - technology aside - I suspect that it is this that must define the electric stage. It is this one-on-one quality that weakens the affinities that might otherwise arise with the Theatre for the Blind. The electric stage is not merely to be experienced through the ears, but through earphones.

Its closest analogue is with the reader and a book. It is not a dynamic intimacy, because there is no interaction, but it is a true intimacy nonetheless.

It is mystery. It is not mystique.

When the doctor removed the needle from my spine, he gave me a chart so that I might fill in, on a daily basis, the future levels of pain I felt. Simply feeling pain is no longer enough. Such is the mystique of the technocrats. It is this that I want my theatre to oppose.