Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

Emperors new clothes?

Keen followers of my blog may have noticed that I have been working with one of the UK's foremost experimental theatre companies for the best part of the last six years. When I started with the company I had a few qualms, their creative method is painful, self-destructive, and almost unendurably long drawn out. The first show I worked on was confused, cheap and ultimately forgettable, we dragged its sorry arse around Europe for eighteen months and then it was quietly binned.

Since then I have recreated their totally undocumented big hit on several continents, designed a show in their current repertoire, and worked on every show since 2006, and yet I still can't make up my mind.

It was easier for me when I went to work for Alan Ayckbourn as resident designer; I had huge prejudices about his plays and the values they explored, ultimately I came to realise that, whilst I mostly understood his jaundiced view, I still hated his adult plays (his children's plays are a delight).

Returning to my employers, I have become increasingly conscious that their current creative process, whatever it might once have been, consists of an excruciating long drawn out process of mutual destruction, and, at the end of it what they produce is a series of structural motifs drawn from previous shows or riffs familiar to them all from improvised works. The only thing that saves them from total Implosion is that they are directed/edited by an extremely clever man who is a genuine theatrical force, and who remains loyal to his friends whatever they do. It's a shame that the same touchy feely group hug concept doesn't apply throughout the company, but then we techies are usually considered to be disposable.

I've just done the Avignon festival, probably the biggest artistic meat market in the world. It's to be my last excursion with this particular company, I'm sorry that after all their public protestations to the contrary they have turned out to be the same as everyone else; when you are leaving a company or you are being sacked it is sometimes very obvious (I should perhaps point out that I have only once been sacked, and that was to make way for a new favourite), but around February this year I stopped getting an updated touring schedule, and all requests for info were denied or stonewalled. So I knew something was up even then.

Avignon is unusual, imagine a crowded and slightly anarchic Edinburgh Festival, temperatures hovering around the mid-30s all day. Every street corner showcasing excerpts from shows. Over 1200 companies in two weeks, all of them clamouring for your attention. It does all get a bit wearing after a while, when the same companies come round again and again, but in terms of atmosphere and good value it has the increasingly tawdry Edinburgh experience beaten hands down. Just as in Edinburgh you can rely on several companies having the same startlingly original idea for a show, in Avignon this year there were at least six productions of the Ubu plays, and any amount of Moliere.

posted by Lampy @ 7/18/2012 08:24:00 pm