“When Van Gogh paints
sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as
man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower
itself. We shall never know what the sunflower
itself is.”
(DH Lawrence in ‘Morality and the Novel’, 1925)
Tim Crouch, with co-directors Karl James and Andy Smith, has created a piece of theatre that renders our relationship to art and reality into calculated questioning. Sufficed to say, I did not stop metaphorically scratching my chin for the duration of the piece, or the days since. But that’s not to say that this is exclusively a play for the highly educated (however a degree that carried a module in modernism is a bonus). No, it’s much smarter than that.
The piece begins with an open stage, the action having started taking place before the audience arrives. The stage manager, seated upstage at a desk full of props, talks into her headset while two children sit centre stage, surrounded by paper and colouring pencils. They wear headphones, isolated from the outside world, facing away from us so that we see neither their drawings nor their faces while they draw. The atmosphere is normal, pedestrian, without any gesture to distinguish whether this is 'theatre' or 'real life'. It is both, and it is neither.
Loud, quickly approaching footsteps from the back of the auditorium signal the beginning of the play in earnest. An art student, delightfully played by Rachel Redford, places a toy panda on a lecturn, awkwardly adjusts her ripped denim shirt and begins a presentation. Were it not for the emphasis on her gawky, self-deprecating demeanour, we might be lead to believe that we were about to watch a lecture on the work of Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb. But the presentation is laced with so much charm and humour that the intellectual weight is neatly offset. She announces "slide" and we shift our focus to two characters standing on stage, primed in their dressing gowns to bring the lecture to life.
But what happens is not, as we might expect, a retelling of the story of Adler and Gibb. Or rather, it is, but not as we might expect it. The actors remove their dressing gowns, standing parallel to each other and staring pointedly out into the audience in nothing but their underpants, echoing the line "I'm wearing a blue blouse" between them. Neither Denise Gough nor Brian Ferguson is wearing a blue blouse, but they say it so many times that I begin to imagine one. And then a dialogue begins, and they set the scene.
The delivery of the text is what is most intriguing here. We learn from the dialogue that these two characters are an actress and her coach, breaking into Adler and Gibb's home to indulge in method acting techniques for a forthcoming film about the artists’ lives. But there are two versions of this story: the one spoken by actors standing still on stage, the other occurring in the audience's imagination. The dialogue itself is almost stripped of emotion and personality, but is spoken with all the right intonations so that instead, the scene and the characters effectively exist in the audience's minds. This is where Crouch's direction of the dialogue is so neat - the story is made organically in the audience's minds, unhindered by a director's vision. Much like the children drawing at the beginning of the piece, you might say.
The children are instrumental in this piece to blurring the line between theatre and reality, driving the sentiment of the scene rather than the actual, physical intention. During the interval, this blur is maintained as the cast and crew take their break in full view of the audience. They are talking, laughing, and Amelda Brown who plays Gibb struggles to open a packet of biscuits. There is nothing unusual about their antics, until a sand pit is brought out for the children to build sandcastles. The adults look dotingly on them, and their games of make-believe lead us into the second act of the play. The innocence of the sandcastles darkens, the stage is cleared, and the little boy lies down in the sand to becomes Adler's dead body. What is interesting here is that if Lou treats the boy as if he is the corpse, and if Sam is vomiting at the sight of it, and if the little girl brings forth a skull that is treated as if it were Adler's, what reason do we have, as an audience, to believe otherwise?
And this is one of the points in question in Crouch's play. During an altercation between Gibb and Sam, there is a constant swap of props in Gibb's right hand that are meant to signify a gun. We settle on a huge plastic lobster, before the real gun is brought out. Although the lobster had its own effect (primarily a laugh from the audience), a feeling of fear is only realised once the real gun is brought out. This leads us to ask: what do we lose - or gain - through reinterpreting an original subject? Likewise, as much as Lou attempts to embody Adler for the film - going to such extreme lengths as admitting that she wishes she could wear the dead body's skin - she will always have a different effect to the original, living person.
All of these questions are brought to the fore when a film set is brought on and a projector screen drops, turning the Royal Court stage from a theatre, to a film studio, to a cinema. We are shown a film of the little moments in the journey that Sam and Lou had up to the moment when they stood before Adler's corpse, that had previously only existed in our mind's eye. It is a surreal moment, because although, like the gun, there is no way to truly replicate each mind's imagery, there is something surreal about seeing this series of recognisable images across the screen. Yet, we have still not been able to witness the events as they truly happened, just as no one except Adler and Gibb can truly imagine the events of their lives. This is a point that is made quite poignant by having the 'real' Gibb in the story, with an understandably bristly resistance to the whole process.
When these biopic films are made, such as 'The Iron Lady', 'The Queen' or 'Saving Mr. Banks', we delight in how wonderful the actors are, and how flawlessly the hair, make-up and costume emulates the subject and the time period. It is evocative, and we feel we understand the subject a little more for having seen an interpretation of their life splashed across a cinema screen. But that’s just it – it’s an interpretation. What we see in Gibb’s case is a real disparity between the Oscar-winning film that the company wish to make, and the attention to the emotional truth of their story that Gibb needs them to make. She does not need the film company to clean her up, dress her up and whisk her away to Hollywood. She needs them to respect and value that she has let herself go due to the emotional downfall of losing her partner. What Crouch communicates through this discord is a cold, unsympathetic approach on behalf of the film makers, that is absolutely not conducive to emulating the ‘true’ story. But, we return to the lobster and gun scenario once more: if everyone can believe that the lobster is the gun, what does it matter? The difference is, the lobster will never be able to fire a bullet, just as a kiss between Gibb and Lou will never feel the same as Gibb and Adler.
The play ends with Lou Mane accepting an award for her performance in the film. Her award is aptly in the shape of a skull, darkly reminiscent of the scene with Adler's dead body. Is Crouch provocatively suggesting here that a story or a piece of art is in fact tarnished by trying to replicate it? This takes us back to the innocent scene at the beginning of the piece of the children drawing. Unlike the film makers, we never even saw their artwork, and they never cared for us observing them. They made work purely, just as we learn Adler and Gibb did, from within the confines of their own lives. After Lou’s acceptance speech, I desperately wanted to return to the innocence of the beginning of the play. Or of the film itself. Anything but the brash, self-congratulating, commercial, shallow side of art.
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