The Author . . . a review.

I went to see The Author by Tim Crouch at The Workshop Theatre on Saturday night. There have been plenty of standard reviews, many on the News From Nowhere website. All very insightful, informative and well written. But I didn’t really want to play along with that game, picking apart the plot, dissecting the directing, critiquing the acting, awarding marks out of five for whatever it is that marks out of five are meant to represent. Been done by cleverer, more theatrically savvy people than me. Originally I wanted to respond with a bit of an experiment. It’s an experimental play, why shouldn’t I do an experimental review? A review that looked like a play. Or at least deployed the conventions of dialogue and unfolding action. Unfortunately I was flummoxed by a formatting issue (Bloody WordPress! Works a charm in Posterous, however.) So instead of the convoluted critical contribution I’ve had to write something that at least looks like a standard review. I’m not going to mention acting, directing, plot or anything like that. There’s nothing much I can add to what’s already been said. But it seems to me, browsing all those reviews, watching the performance and reading the text of the play carefully over the past couple of days, that there’s some funny ideas floating around. The Author is a play of ideas. Not all of them are good ones. And, by the way, none of this will make any sense if you haven’t seen the play. You may as well stop reading now.

“Music is present in the play as a release valve,” it says in the note on the very first page of the text. That made me a bit worried. What the heck would I need a release valve for? Would I positively pop with pent up anxiety if I there wasn’t any soothing tunes piped into the theatre to help me relieve the emotional pressure? Obviously it’s only a metaphor, but this idea of emotional hydraulics underpins the whole narrative. The play seems to suggest that there’s a cauldron of sexual and aggressive instincts roiling away inside us all which may leak, spill, burst, explode if not carefully channelled. It’s an outdated, clapped out and discredited theory but one that’s still active in society. Just because it isn’t true doesn’t make it any the less dangerous.

Both the acts of violence committed by Vic are explained by this tension/release metaphor. When he hits the waiter for accidentally splashing him with hot oil (a symbolic act of aggression perhaps) he says he “flipped” owing to the pressure built up during the rehearsal process which had subjected him to ever more intense images of brutality: “There was no release at the end of the play. It just balled up. Tighter and tighter.” The phrase “to flip a lid” derives from the metaphor of a pot boiling over and blowing off it’s cover in the days before the release valve was invented. Later, in the climactic scene where he talks us through how he came to batter Chris so badly he says it was because he “came too close . . . Too close for that moment.” Vic’s rational surface ego was ruptured by contact with Chris. Violence exploded naturally as a volcano erupting.

It’s significant that Vic uses the phrase, “balled up.” There’s a fairly crude stereotype of male sexuality at work in the play, one that represents men as simply interested in “getting laid . . . or smashing each other’s brains in,” as Chris so charmingly puts it in his first monologue. Any available orifice seems to be the masculine motto. When they are not busy lopping off bits of other men’s anatomy, men are busy sticking bits of their own anatomy in places where their anatomy ought not to be. Tim’s final shocking revelation is entirely in keeping with this view of male desire. Tim justifies his crime as “quite gentle, quite loving” but the scene effectively enacts the cliche that male desire operates outside the moral dimension, is simply subject to the stereotypical tension/trigger/release economy.

Women in the play don’t have the same recourse to extravagant venting and crude acting out as men. Esther experiences as much violence and brutality as any of the male characters but contains the horror within and collapses internally, making her own body victim rather than externalising and hurting others. She doesn’t rage; she cries. She says she’s not eating, not sleeping, not able to touch anyone, unable to care for her child, and seeing blood and gore everywhere. Like Vic she’s “having a bit of a breakdown,” but whereas he lashes out, releases the pressure by venting and violence, she just cries; “It’s good to cry. I think it’s good . . . It means we are getting somewhere.” In one scene she actually mimics the jerking movements of a man being beheaded, identifying with ultimate weakness and victimhood, empathising but powerless, perfectly representing the stereotypical female reaction.

The play doesn’t question the assumptions about emotional dynamics or gender coding. None of the reviews I’ve read even hint that there’s a problem. Maybe this is because most of the reviewers are part of the theatrical world and are therefore blind to some of it’s assumptions. All the reviews go along with the idea that images can infect, emotions are contagious, men and women naturally respond to trauma in certain fixed ways, actors can become possessed by their characters and acting is best when it’s “real, not rhetorical but active.” Perhaps the biggest blindspot is the lack of any critique of the social relations of theatrical production. it’s not a problem of “the unbearable image,” it’s how the imagery is used, presented, put into context. How the imagery is played. The fictional director Tim subjects his actors to what is in effect a social experiment, told they have to traumatise themselves in order to represent trauma authentically, encouraged not just to play a part but penetrate “deeper and deeper into the truth of it.” None of the reviewers see that situation as problematical and instead concentrate on the dynamics of spectatorship, how looking at brutality implicates the viewer in moral turpitude, as if simply looking was the problem. At one point in the play I almost wanted to stop Tim and shout, “Bollocks!” He’s talking about his relationship to images of “gory details,” how he “took it upon himself to look at images of abuse” and follow all the links on the web. He says he was bombarded by horror, “remarkably easy to find. Harder almost not to.” What this does is put the responsibility back onto the images (which really have no power in themselves, only the power we invest in them) and not onto the intention, decision, and artistic control of the person who is assembling them. Same with the actors feeling like they needed therapy after the run; nothing to do with the images, all to do with the way the writer/director chose to frame the actors relationship to the material. Social relationship not spectatorship is the question.

Anyway, I’ll dismount from my high horse now. Critique aside I had a very enjoyable evening. I’d certainly go see it again, and maybe even “interact” next time.

A couple of quibbles though. The note says the audience should be “beautifully lit and cared for.” The lighting! Sorry, I felt like I was on the operating table . . . it was a bit harsh. My baldy head was glinting like a glitterball at a fifth form disco. And I’m not sure I want to be “cared for” in the theatre thank you very much. There are better things you could be doing with your time and other places I feel more comfortable undergoing the attentions of a care giver. Same goes for the continual fussing over the audience’s emotional well-being (“Is everyone all right?” “Is this okay?” “Can you all see all right?”) Grated after a while. It was like the actors had just returned giddy from a customer care course and were worried that some parts of the play may be recorded for training purposes. I could have done without.

Still, minor quibbles. Makes you think though. Doesn’t it?