LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Saturday, June 30, 2012

'100% London' at the Hackney Empire, 29th June 2012

Saturday, June 30, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'100% London' is a theatre of demographics and statistics, a theatre of the multitude.  If it does tell a story, then it is one of the city's passions, pain and pride.  This production, by company Rimini Protokoll, features 100 participants chosen in a kind of daisy-chain.  One person asks another, and they ask a friend and so on.  Eventually we end up with a cross-section of the populace, a tumultuous mix of ages, races, religions, genders, sexualities, nationalities and politics.

This blog is called 'London City Nights', but I haven't really had an opportunity before this to talk much about the city as a whole.  I love this city, I love everything about it - even the stuff I hate, if that makes any sense.  If I could choose to live anywhere in the world, I'd live in London.  Someone in this production comments: "London isn't like the rest of England, it's different".  To someone who hasn't been sucked into the whirlpool this sounds like a cliche Londoncentric attitude, a prime example of the viewpoint that life ends at the M25.  But it's true.  London really isn't like the rest of the country: it's more dynamic, more open-minded, more flexible and, somewhat ironically given the cliches, more welcoming. This year, for better or worse, London is in the spotlight. The advertising seems to focus on spectacle - all swooping helicopter shots over the thrusting phallic landmarks and giant bells clanging over it.  Ordinary Londoners are notable by their absence.  So this show seeks to redress the balance - taking the collective psychic subconsciousness of the London public and throwing it onto stage.

Harnessing this sea of opinion and history is necessarily a messy affair.  The show is rough around the edges and there is a distinct lack of glamour.  We open with a lone man on stage who tells us the recent history of the Hackney Empire, and how he used to play bingo here.  He looks a little nervous and talks haltingly.  The stage looks enormous around him, and I feel a pang of sympathy for him, while at the same time hoping that the rest of this performance isn't going to be this awkward.  He tells us of his life, about his emigration from Jamaica in the 60s and his subsequent life in Hackney.  As we get an understanding of the man he introduces another person, who tells us something about themselves, they introduce another friend to us and so on.  We meet 100 people in this manner.  They're not rushed and seem to get as long as they want to speak to us.  Some of them briefly announce their name and move on in moments, some of them tell us fairly long anecdotes about their past.  You might think that 100 people seems like a lot - how can we be expected to meet so many people without it all becoming a bit samey?  But there is always some spark that sets them apart from the crowd, something that makes them stick in our minds.  

After we've been introduced to everyone we move onto the meat of the matter - where they're quizzed about their viewpoints, asked questions as varied as "Do you think the NHS should be privatised?", "Are women and men treated equally?" and "Do you think Mandarin Chinese should be taught in schools?"  The crowd divide themselves according to their answers, forming and reforming into two groups showing their opinion.  There is a camera high above the stage, and the view from above is projected onto a circular screen above the stage.  It neatly transforms the movement of the people on stage into something diagrammatical, allowing us to see the people impersonally, as points of data on a chart.

The split viewpoint is used in a number of interesting ways in the performance, it's frequently visually arresting - particularly when the crowd is asked some personal questions they may prefer to be anonymous for.  The lights go down and they're asked to raise their mobile phone screens up to the camera if they're answering 'yes'.  The result picture looks like a view from a telescope, tiny balls of light shimmering in the darkness.  It's quite beautiful, and if the theme of this show is to highlight the beauty of a person in the crowd then symbolically showing them as stars shining in the night sky is a wonderful way of doing it.

Another wonderful sequence is when they ask the crowd to mime what they're doing at different times of the day.  It's a hilarious way of showing the 24 hour nature of London, a city that never sleeps.  As people drop off to sleep some are still partying away, and as they rise for work others fall asleep.  Once again it divides the crowd  yet still allows us to view them as one organism working in harmony.

As we see more of their opinions we begin to become surprised by some of the participants.  You can't help but form your own picture of their lives and how they think, it's easy to try and fit them into your own stereotypes and then it's strangely uplifting when they defy them.  Who would have thought that this sweet looking old lady spent 4 years in prison for trying to smuggle a bus full of marijuana through Europe?  That the fashionable and slightly self conscious teenage girl with hair over one eye has apparently experienced some kind of military service?  It's an excellent demonstration of the maxim that people are not pre-packaged bundles of opinions and ideas; just because someone believes in x does not mean they will automatically believe in y.

Later in the show more personal questions are asked, and we seem to peer into these people's lives in a more intimate manner.  People come forward who've survived cancer and stand together.  A group who've suffered from depression.  People who've thought about killing themselves.  Never does one person stand alone during any of these, and it's somehow comforting that no matter what you've been through there is someone who can empathise with you.  There is one sequence where they are asked to come forward "If they think they will be dead within 10 years?".  A small group of people stand at the front of the stage, almost aggressively confronting us with the nature of their confessed fragile mortality.  The next question is asked "Who thinks they'll be dead within 30 years?", the crowd grows larger, the question is asked again this time for 70 years, and finally 120.  Everyone stands on stage, even the young children.  It's a weird moment seeing these small children acknowledging their own mortality.

There are some flaws with this performance - they change things up frequently to keep things fresh, but it is hard to get away from the fact that this is essentially a series of questions asked for two hours and occasionally during some of the less illuminating questions it becomes a bit dull.  But usually within a few minutes some odd statistical quirk or funny anecdote will set you thinking again (Wow, a lot of people seem to support Britain becoming a republic.  Hm.).  There's also a bit towards the end of the show where they ask the audience if they can take a minute without nothing happening on stage.  Maybe it's because the night before I watched a similar scene and can already fully appreciate how long a minute can feel. Either way, while admittedly an interesting exercise in time perception, it is also pretty boring.  Fortunately this is a blip, the show generally holds your attention throughout and you're constantly being shown interesting 'data' to evaluate.

At times, nearly everyone finds the sheer size of London intimidating.  They sense themselves being chipped away by the multitude, losing their individuality and becoming just another face in a huge crowd.  When travelling in rush hour on the tube its hard not to feel like a product, something being shuttled around an uncaring system, a rat running madly around a maze with no escape or reward at the end.  This show is an experience that cures that malaise.  It forces you to come to realisation that everyone around you has their own story, personality, or something to set them apart from the crowd, and that you do too.  It'd be very easy for a production like this to take a fiercely anti-individualistic position, and treat this crowd purely as a symbolic representation of the 7.5 million inhabitants of London.  They're not, they're defined strongly as individuals in their own right, and by extension so is the audience.

This year the fear of your personality being dissolved into the masses has another level:  London itself is under attack.  London's individuality is under siege, people having their homes transformed into missile platforms,  bulldozers clearing space for  brushed aluminium Olympic venues and hamburger stands.  If there ever was a time for a production to unambiguously say that the power of London is in its citizens it is now.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

'66 Minutes in Damascus' at Shoreditch Town Hall, 23rd June 2012

Sunday, June 24, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

(promo picture for the play, the rest of the pictures on this page are news photos from Syria)

'66 Minutes in Damascus', written and directed by Lucien Bourjeily, is probably the most intense and terrifying theatrical experience I've ever been through in my life.  I'm writing this on the last day of performance, so I feel somewhat comfortable spoiling things, this is a production that works so much better when you don't know exactly what's going to happen going in.

I had only read a very vague description of what was to come, but I'd gathered that it was an interactive theatre experience that would try and show me a little of what life is like in contemporary Damascus as the Assad regime cracks down on the populace with the might of the Syrian Armed Forces while the Free Syrian Army retaliates.  I was a little concerned that this would be a kind of vicarious warzone tourism for Westerners.  I didn't want  something that was just going to shake me up with a series of loud bangs and flashes to give me some sensory overload, a kind of a theme park, rollercoaster view of the conflict.  I needn't have worried, as while this did leave  me in a kind of wired, adrenaline overload, it did it while presenting a frighteningly plausible simulation of an experience in an Assad  regime detention centre.

The premise is that myself and seven other participants are Western tourists that have come to Damascus to sightsee.  As we arrive at Shoreditch Town Hall we're led into a hotel lobby.  There's posters advertising the sights of the city, and small cups of tea to drink.  A very pleasant receptionist takes our details and as people fill into the room she tells us about the sights we'll be seeing in the city, how we'll have to take off our shoes in order to enter the Umayyad Mosque and to be careful at the market and so on.  Eventually our friendly bus driver arrives, and we follow him through the building as he teaches us a few basic Arabic phrases.  As he jokes with us we are led down some stairs, and then out of the corner of our eyes we see a man with an AK47 assault rifle by the stairs.

Before we have time to process what's going on everyone starts screaming in Arabic, and we're shoved against the wall with our hands above our heads over our heads.  All around us men are shouting orders in Arabic, and one by one we have black bags placed over our heads, blocking out all light.  It's astonishing how terrifying and disconcerting this is.   Even with the mental safety net of knowing I'm in Shoreditch at a theatrical performance, I still find my legs and hands shaking involuntarily.  We're roughly led outside and into a van, where our hands are buckled down between our legs and people beat the outside of the menacingly.  We're driven around while Syrian music is blared at us, and the van rocks over rough terrain.  It's difficult to tell where we are going, and the van drives for a sufficiently long time as to completely disorientate us.  It stops, and still blind and hooded we're marched, hands on each other's shoulders into a room where the hoods are pulled off.

We seem to be in some Syrian Army commander's office.  He sits behind a desk as we line up in front of him, an ominous picture of Assad bearing down from the wall behind him (his picture is omnipresent throughout the performance).  He checks our names against a list, and informs us that one our group is a journalist and has 'illegally' sent a report out of the country.  He's going to find out which one.  He then threateningly lectures us about Western intervention in the Middle East, repeating a popular saying; "before there was one Saddam Hussein, now there are millions of Saddam Husseins'. He quizzes us as to whether our system of government is much better than his.  It's valid political commentary, even though it's being used to justify the murderous Assad regime in Syria.  It's not like we can debate this guy though, we've been too shocked into submission to argue.   When he pointed at me and asked my name, I was surprised by how shaky and nervous my response was.  Again, even though I 'knew' it wasn't real, apparently my body didn't.

Following this lecture we're marched down a corridor and made to stand arms in the air and heads up.  Also lying in the corridor is a beaten and bloody man under a sheet.  He desperately asks us to contact his mother and let her know that he's here.  I find myself somewhat paranoid and avoid talking to him, how do I know he's not some plant put here to get information out of me?  Very quickly you slip into a paranoid and somewhat placid state - I found myself having Stockholm Syndrome-like thoughts of pleasing the people that were ordering me around.  You find yourself doing what they say, marching, running, standing against the wall, without thinking.

We're next led into a darkened room where the door is shut.  A shambling, mumbling presence creeps up behind us and whispers in our ear.  It's another prisoner, who tells us we've been here for 20 years.  He asks where we're from, and when we respond Britain, he says we're 20 years too late.  This moment in the darkened cell with the somewhat deranged prisoner is sort of a moment of downtime for us.  He leads us around his cell and tells us about his life and political opinions, talking to a sock puppet which represents Assad.  The slight slackening of the psychological pressure on us makes this feel a little more expository than what we've seen so far.  There is a rattling at the door as the chains shake, and we scuttle instinctively back to our submissive position against the wall in order to avoid being singled out for abuse.

We're then lead down a corridor to another prison cell, this one much smaller, but better lit.  We're in the cell with two women, who have been renamed Muhammed and Ahmed, so the other prisoners don't realise they're being held captive with women.  They tell us about their lives, one has been arrested for writing an English language blog, and the other has a husband that refused to fire against civilians.  They explain how they pass the time by playing games with each other and arguing.  The subject of armed resistance vs peaceful demonstration is debated, with the girls taking opposite positions.  I'm drawn into the debate, and say that peaceful demonstration can only go so far, and that violent resistance is justified when the state uses indiscriminate lethal force against the populace.  She responds by saying that she fears a civil war will erupt, and I point out that the situation in Syria is already a civil war.  A lot of people are going to die no matter when happens, and they may as well be the authoritarian child-murderers that are the muscle behind Assad.  I consider myself to have a very cursory understanding of the current situation in Syria, so I'm not exactly on comfortable ground debating this.  Before too long though, the guards are back, and we're marched down the corridor into the 'torture' room.

The room features a dentist's chair, and variety of sinister looking tools sit on racks behind it.  Pools of blood lie on the floor around it, as does an ominously sparking car battery.  One person is singled out to be tortured, and as 'luck' would have it, it's me.  I'm strapped to the dentist's chair, and everyone else is led out.  Now it's just me and the torturer, who barks questions at me and accuses me of being a Jew.  He shines a bright light in my eyes, and blows long plumes of cigarettes smoke into the room.  Then he gets called away for a moment, and I'm left on my own in the room.  I decide "to hell with this", and escape.  I slip my hands free of the restraints and peek around the door to see if anyone's watching in the corridor.  No-one is. I quickly work out a plan.  There are two doors opposite the interrogation  room, but I don't know what's behind them, and worry that they might lead to dead ends.  In the end I settle for squeezing myself into the space behind the door to the torture room, and plan to close the door on the interrogator and run off towards the exit.

As I'm hiding behind the door, heart pumping and trying to be as quiet as possible I reflect on whether I'm supposed to be trying to escape or not?  I mean, I wasn't restrained particularly effectively, is this what they want me to be doing?  Is this a psychological test of my submissiveness - to see whether I will do what they tell me to, even though a way out is right in front of me?  It strikes me that this 'escape' attempt isn't really telling me much about the current situation in Syria, it's more allowing me to act out a Hollywood style prison break and fuel some heroic masturbatory fantasy of mine.  If I was really being held in a torture room by the Syrian Army, would I really try and escape?  This is after all, a piece of theatre, and I know there are going to be no real consequences to my escape.  Even so, my heart is thumping like a drum, and I'm holding my breath as I hear the guard coming back down the corridor to my hiding spot.  As he turns the corner into the cell I try and close the door on him and run away.  He chases me, and quickly I find myself cornered in a dead end and surrender.  A hood is placed over my head again, and once more I'm lead down a corridor while being prodded with clubs.  I am asked if I 'love Assad', and still flush with heroic feelings I 'bravely' respond 'No!' repeatedly.  Things go quiet, and after a while I take my hood off and look around.  

I'm back surrounded by the rest of the group, who mostly still have their hoods on. The smiling face of the theatre assistant greets me, it's over, it felt like a lot longer than 66 minutes..  Everyone seems shaken up by their experience.  I'm still jittery, hyped up on adrenaline with my hands and legs shaking a little.  Stepping out into the Shoreditch nightlife feels incredibly bizarre after this, and strange paranoid and excitable thoughts fill my head for hours afterwards.

This is a somewhat difficult piece of theatre to analyse.  It really is intense and terrifying, but ultimately it is also entertaining.  The stated aim is to raise awareness of what is happening in Assad's prisons and detention centres, but even though this feels realistic, deep down I know what is actually happening must be infinitely worse and infinitely more psychologically destructive.  It succeeded in making me think that I could empathise with the experiences of those interrogated, but this must necessarily be an illusion.  How could I look someone in the eye who'd actually been through this sort of treatment and tell them that I'd paid £15 and gone to the centre of trendy London to put myself through a simulation of what they'd been forced through?  This was after all, my choice.

But on the other hand the programme does assure us that the events we've been through are based on testimony from former political detainees, and admits that they can only "modestly portray only a small fraction of the dreadfulness and absurdity of what political detainment in Syria really is under the Assad regime."  Putting audiences through this simulation of very real events to raise awareness about what is going on is a noble aim, the more people outraged at the way the Assad regime is treating its citizenry the better.   But, it seems other than awareness that there is almost nothing that we, the audience members can do about this incredibly complicated situation.  It's a worrying feeling of impotence, one which Adam Curtis has summarised as "Oh Dearism".

It is precisely this kind of impotent feeling that makes this piece of theatre somewhat problematic for me.  Is it worth transforming people's very real traumatic experiences of psychological torture into theatre to inform Western audiences?  It feels a little exploitative for me to get an adrenaline fix by dipping my toe into the horrors of contemporary Syria.  Especially since, at times I felt like I was acting out my personal revolutionary fantasies about resisting torture by an authoritarian regime and attempting escape.  While it was exciting at the time, in retrospect it feels somewhat like using what is horrifying reality for people right now to stroke my own ego.


As a piece of theatre it is stunningly effective, convincing and something that'll stay with me for a very long time.  It's a triumph of disturbingly convincing set design and acting so realistically threatening that you feel a genuine sense of malevolence from the actors playing the soldiers, and very real desperation from the prisoners.  Even so, despite all this acting skill and expert staging my reaction to the situation in Syria is still much along the lines of "Oh dear, this is awful", rather than being given any kind of constructive framework to be able to effect any kind of change in Syria.  I've been made aware of what is going on, but is that enough?