Sunday 10 April 2016

Pantomime – an under-appreciated form

‘He’s behind you’; ‘Oh no he isn’t’; ‘Boooooo’; ‘Hissssssssss’;’ Yeeeeeeyyy’. There is nothing more satisfying or deliciously child-like than screaming this at a performer at the top of your voice; releasing an un-self-consciousness flow of energy and emotion and somehow believing fully in the actions of the absurdly dressed residents of the stage. 

Pantomime is a peculiar creature: it exists as its own categorisation, has its own ‘season’ and it does wonders at the Box Office; but in terms of credibility and integrity it has almost nil, sitting behind the Musical, and it is never going to win any serious writing or acting awards. Yet as a form it is very intricate and complicated and is much beloved in British culture, indeed, it is a very British form – chock full of irony, innuendo, role-reversals, cultural references and a ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge’ form of participation and is heavily steeped in tradition, while remaining perpetually modern.  I instinctively think that pantomime as a form in the theatre is thoroughly under-appreciated and has the potential for a much greater synthesis. 

A regular night out at the theatre, in my experience as a constant attendee and reviewer, is one of a pursuit enjoyed quietly in the dark – a very restrained, bourgeois activity to be reflected on and discussed thoughtfully in corners at the appropriate time after the show. I know this isn’t always the case, and there are a lot of exciting shows that break this mould, but the image of theatre, or Theatre, as a high-brow, scholarly endeavour, is alienating and exclusionary to a lot of people; which is a tragedy considering utterly unique and transformative power of the stage.  Live theatre has the advantage of taking place in the same space and time as the audience which means they can interact in ways that are immediate and transformative – at the cinema you cannot cause a change in dynamic of the actors onscreen, at a concert there is rarely a narrative to respond to, and books certainly don’t allow for any collective connection. I think it is time for theatre to move further away from its crusty image and, in this brave new world of youth, digital media and interactive content, I think theatre is in a very privileged position to forge something new and innovative. In this respect Pantomime, as a form, is trying to show us the way.

When I refer to Pantomime as a form I don’t necessarily mean the content (the childish themes, linear morality that lacks subtlety and celebrities dressed in sparkly costumes), but the open, inclusive, interactive entrance into a narrative that had connects both tradition and the present with a community of engaged participants. I was recently an usher at the Iris Theatre in Covent Garden as they put on a promenade theatre piece of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. During the play, which moved around several areas of the garden and church, the audience was just as much part of the action as the actors; they were a riotous mob on the steps of the Forum in Rome, they were conspirators plotting outside Brutus’s house, they were members of the roman senate – some even sat in thrones on-stage; this was done in a much more subtle way than a pantomime, but the result was the same, a blurring of the line and a communal, interactive experience. In fact if we look back in time to the performances of Shakespeare’s plays at theatres during Tudor/Jacobean times, they were often riotous affairs, the hoi polloi would be in the pit closest to the stage eating and shouting and drinking, emitting various bodily liquids – the actors of the time would have had to be adept at dealing with the heckling and noise – the audience were involved in the performance in a way that is nothing like the quiet enjoyment Shakespeare demands now.  This is what seems odd about the theatre: despite the fact you may be incredibly moved and inspired, existing in a realm of experience you didn’t even know could be possible, you must remain quiet and subdued, keeping all the wonders inside; the sense of a Dionysian collective connection is stifled. Pantomime doesn’t demand this, it says: interact, let out your feelings, chant, heckle and laugh: be at one with the crowd.

It is this sense of ‘line blurring’ that is pantomimes greatest potential and if we look at Baudrillard’s  theory of hyperreality we can get a clearer picture of how panto represents and fits into the contemporary world of multiple and digital existence that is becoming ever more smudged together with daily lives. The concept of hyperreality is a complex ever evolving one, but the most relevant notion here is the disappearance of the distinction between real and illusion – in this context: between the audience, safe in their role of spectator, and the actors, part of the construct that constitutes the play. According to Baudrillard, the digital, simulated nature of our existence, in many areas of our lives, has made the real/illusion distinction erroneous, ‘we no longer exist as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks’. He states ‘there are no longer either actors or spectators; all are immersed in the same reality’. The form of the pantomime lends itself to this, the audience are just as much part of the show as the performers, the actors make no attempt to pretend the show isn’t a construct they are acting out, they talk to the audience, respond to their shouts, occasionally throwing things at them or brining them up on-stage. The distinction that exists in more ‘serious’ forms of theatre between, real/illusion is blurred and exploited, it can be seen as playful and, in a way, subversive.  
The conventions of panto are bewilderingly complex to the layman, even explaining them becomes a tad galling: the main protagonist is a girl dressed as a boy, that everyone knows is a girl but has to pretend they don’t; there is more often than not a ‘dame’ who is a man dressed as a lady in the most conspicuously ridiculous dresses and make-up, again we are all in on the conspiracy and there are often several jokes based around the ambiguous gender of these characters. The stories are loosely based on a set number of well known fairy tales, but are cut up and amended in an infinite number of ways, jokes and references are made to current events, some real and some imaginary; the narrative involves a mixture of the world of the fairytale and the current digital world we inhabit. Sometimes people or celebrities appear as themselves or the characters they play elsewhere, sometimes they are the same characters but under a different guise. Sometimes audience members are invited on-stage to take part in the action, or invited to make collective decisions about the narrative. 

Pantomime is more akin to a hyperreal environment and this is what it has to teach us: real and illusion is becoming irrelevant in our everyday lives, why should it be maintained in a ‘fictional’ environment; This is not a call to turn every play into a pantomime – but more like a big comedy rubber hand pointing towards the potential of something new. Theatre has the great advantage of happening in the here and now of a person’s perception, it should play to this; in a way theatre should become less real; we have enough reality on TV and at the cinema, we need a new form of theatre, with the atmosphere of a football match, chants and emotion, spontaneous unique events – not like the X-factor, Big Brother kind – but a new credible form, a synthesis: Ibsen plays incorporating pantomime dynamics: A Deleuzian intersection of two lines of flight assembling into a new becoming; a theatre for everyone where audience and actor are one and the same event. And I’m sure there have been many experiments along these lines in small dark rooms at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and who’s to say these brave pioneers are not the avant garde taking the first steps into no-man’s-land?

Pantomime is under-appreciated for the glut of possibilities it contains, and I’m not suggesting that panto isn’t based primarily on a Pavlovian response to recognised conventions (‘yeyyyyy’ to the good guy, ‘booooooo’ to the bad guy) and lacking in subtlety; but the form, the potential of the playful, inclusive, community-based engagement that can transform the narrative and therefore produce a unique, affecting event is the golden goose to be set free. 

Monday 2 February 2015

My Name - The Nightmare



[…] the sight alone [in the mirror] of the whole form of the human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is premature in relation to a real mastery.
Jaques Lacan

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek

It was the preceding normality that made it so disturbing: utter habitual ordinariness, a well-rehearsed routine, page after page I go, the pleasure of the text, ding, ding, ding, all my values reinforced and kept in their place, blah blah, all the usual stuff, words leading to the same conclusion but in a slightly different way – it was all good. Then, kapow, something tore a hole in the page – I’m talking metaphorically here obviously, I didn’t turn the page in a particularly ungainly manner, neither did a stray cat, while attempting to get my attention, puncture the page from behind with its claws.

I picked this particular book out of a pile to be disposed of during a flat move in August; I’m not really sure what it was that caught my eye now, it was a book published in the USA in 1993 called Criminals by Margot Livesey, and the cover had two hands coming out from the centre of a lake holding a baby. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to what attracted me to it – fate, the objet petit a, coincidence, all of the above; but I picked it up and stored it for reading later.
But, what if they were true, all those paranoid thoughts and obsessive mental meanderings that swirl in our heads, and what if they were confirmed all in one fell swoop?  Arrrgggghhhhhhhhhh. I’m pretty sure we all have these well-worn fantasies, albeit irrational, of being the centre of the world, that there is someone or something following us and going to great lengths to get to us – something that is organising the whole world just to freak us out and keep us down; I often hear people talk excitedly of events that seem impossible but have become somehow linked in reality. There sometimes seems like a consistent thread in our lives leading us to the simple conclusion that there is a cogent narrative. Rationally, these are things that we try push into the background of our thought-holes, I mean, it’s all just imaginary bunkum isn’t it? Fairy tales from another world, lots of chance events mixed with a will for meaning, it can’t be true, really; but we have all thought it…haven’t we…erm haven’t we?

Well, I got caught bang in the middle of the knot, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real were suddenly the same thing, one cohesive howl in my face, anything I could imagine was a fact. The whole world suddenly did revolve around me, it was 100% true, it was so many feelings at once, it was the exact opposite of the absurd, the opposite of an epiphany, the opposite of inspiration – is there a word for this feeling? It turns out there might be…
My name is Martin Pettitt, yes, that is four ts in my surname, somewhat unwieldy you will agree, there are so many ways my surname has been mis-spelt over the years and indeed so many different variations of the surname that other people claim as their own: Petit, Pettit etc. – also, yes, I am aware it could possibly derive from the French word for small. This is my name, I see it and I recognise myself in it, I wilfully say 'that is me', in much the same way I say the same when I see myself in the mirror.

So, I was reading this book, I was about two thirds through it, when this happened:  





What‽ What‽ What‽[1]


Yeah, you saw right, that’s my name, my rather unorthodox and cumbrous name, all of it, every last t.


And the world set afloat, the first thing I did was look over my shoulder, I was actually lying in bed at the time and so almost hit my head on the wall, everything had changed in that moment, walls no longer had physical substance and I was the messiah. It was that initial reaction that was the most disturbing and the loss of control lasted for about 20 seconds, a bloody long 20 seconds – it was like placing the finishing touches to a structure that you always feared you were building and realising that the final pieces were those bars on the window.  It was like a glitch in the matrix, someone communicating with me from beyond; it was fantasy realised, which as Žižek states, equates to nightmare – a disturbing fantasmatic intensity of never-ending pursuit perceived as real.

My good friend (and she would know: http://muthacourage.blogspot.co.uk/) described that feeling later as: ‘experiencing a little bit of psychosis’. This made me think of Lacan’s suggestion that neurotics are characterised by doubt, ‘psychosis is characteristic of certainty’. Normally I’m firmly ensconced in the neurotic camp, doubting everything from whether I’m standing in the right way to whether 136+235=371. Nothing I do seems to have a single irrefutable line of thought, I can destroy the immutable principles of mathematics with my raging uncertainty; but in that moment, that 20 seconds or so, everything was certain, every last fear and neurosis regarding the true desire of the Other was confirmed. And it was… odd, unbearable, head-under-water; every imaginary tangent was real, anything I could imagine had lost its definition, it was hued into one single horrifying narrative that was certain. 
...
Was I experiencing psychosis, well, ‘a little bit of psychosis’? If it was then bring back my neurotic tendencies, all is forgiven. All of those people with smiling faces on pictures and all those experts with confidence and charm seemingly certain of their actions and feelings look so attractive; I always presumed certainty would be amazing, I could swagger around solving problems, ‘high-fiving those who dared, then moonwalking out of the scene’; and but it wasn’t, it was bloody horrible, too much. To anyone with a vivid imagination certainty is the worst nightmare. 
...
Of course my reason returned after 20 seconds and I laughed at how foolish I had been, nuzzling my neurosis like a plush toy, after all it’s all just a load of twaddle isn’t it, ahahaha. A pure coincidence, layers upon layers of actions, mistakes, chance events and all that other stuff; who knows where Margot Livesey got the name from, but she certainly wasn’t sitting back and chuckling after she wrote it thinking – now we play the waiting game, in 21 years’ time this is definitely going to freak him out. It was ridiculous and I shook off the thought and got on with my life, but it definitely left a trace for a while, a sly undercurrent that didn’t let go quite as easily; like waking from a dream that you can’t remember but that stays with you; as much as I know it was coincidence, there is a part that still wants it to be true.
Maybe this is a phenomenon that is more familiar than I realise, the sudden and brief realisation of certainty that everything you feared is true – maybe there is a German word for it or something. 


I’m off to play tennis with Kenneth.





[1] Yes, this indeed is an interrobang: half exclamation, half question, all double-hard bastard of a punctuation mark.

Friday 28 March 2014

I solved the problem of the decline in book sales

This is what reading books does to your head.
I work in a book shop and it occurred to me yesterday how customers often talk about buying books in the same way they talk about fast food or not keeping to a diet: 'I know I shouldn't but...' 'I just couldn't help myself.' 'My husband/wife will kill me...' This is always said with a sly grin held up by the prongs of naughtiness - a pleasure of transgression. Of course in the most part they are referring to already having too many books cluttering up the wheezing bookshelves of their lives, but there is a similarity in the discourse that must be linked to the same instinct. We all know how big the Diet/Fast Food industry is and how the bookshop trade always seems to be in decline. The solution seems obvious - lets re-market books as bad for you, they will rot your brain make you intellectually obese and make you realise things that you will regret later in life. Reading books will cause you all sorts of trouble, and that's not to mention how quickly they catch fire, if you are holding a book you are potentially a fire-hazard skating on the tightrope of  life and death. BOOKS WILL KILL YOU, DON'T BUY THEM. There that should do it. I have saved the Book trade. Hazzzaaaaaahhh.


Saturday 9 November 2013

My Riot Pt. 2 I Need A Poo



...As I walked to Clapham Junction there was a palpable atmosphere of danger in the air, like a fizzing and pulsating, a sparkling in the skin roots. The people coming towards me from the ‘the riot’ were chatting excitedly, talking to others on their mobile phones; there were displays of passion, real experience, expectations set adrift. This was not reported on the news, the excitement and exhilarating fervour, it felt strangely to me like the last night of a music festival, that kind of loose and lethal comradeship. I carried on walking, passing a Police car with a gaggle of officers chatting to each other with folded arms, I was expecting them to stop me but they didn’t, so on I went past closed shops and houses, many people were hanging out of their windows trying to catch a glimpse and a story of something. 


All of a sudden I was in the centre of it all, it just appeared before me like the entrance to hell or the secret world only accessible through he back of a wardrobe. I saw shops on fire, windows being smashed, people pouring into T K Maxx and out again with concealed faces, many were wheeling stolen suitcases and struggling with armfuls of random products; Starbucks had been obliterated, strangely there was a man and two girls sat inside in the middle of the wreckage drinking from Starbucks cups. Was I scared? Not really, there were the people doing the rioting and then there were quite a lot of people walking through as I was, standing, looking and egging-on like kids watching a school fight; again they were taking pictures, chatting on phones, excited, energised, taking in the atmosphere, trying to remember all the details to tell their friends the next day. A fully interactive film right before their eyes; they had imaginary screens around their bodies as if they weren’t really there. It was almost like promenade theatre, I stood with a group as we watched a man throwing a fire extinguisher at a metal shutter – to be honest if this guy represented the radical potential of the working class to overthrow its oppressors, I wasn’t holding my breath – he wasn’t even making a dent, he eventually got so frustrated he started to kick it, hmm, I moved on.


I could have stayed there all night, it felt good to be where it was all happening – the only thing was I was really desperate for a poo and it was getting more and more urgent, I walked out of the scene, but not before I saw two young men helping an old man in through the broken window of a sports shop. It was this strange type of community that was also missing from the media, they embodied a kind of contradiction part thug, part gentleman. Not linear.


Yes, humans can be bastards and if you promise so much and give so little, something will snap. But on this night some of them were also loving and compassionate siblings, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers – some of them. They are split too, between the reality of their lives and their place in an abstract system of money and things. Are we being run by humans or an abstract system that we created and now can’t control? Death of the author. The pure energy and emotion expended that night, gave a glimpse of the dissatisfaction and potential force of the collective majority – but they were fighting for the wrong team, by stealing stuff they are reinforcing and securing the system that keeps them in the place they are trying to escape from.   

Mercifully, I managed to find a bar just around the corner that was still open, I can’t remember its name now, at the time I only had one thing on my mind. I went in did my business and then bought a drink in the bar and started to watch the TV as they was relaying events that were literally happening 100 foot away. I had a very strange shrinking feeling, it was so weird, all I saw was violence, evil, destruction, some guy trying to break a cash machine,  all accompanied by the monotone, morose voice of the newsreader, relaying the objective, but subtlety derogatory, truth into my face.  Dear emotion, camaraderie, absurdity and inspiration, I’m leaving you, I’m going to live with banality, safety, boredom and the same old shit. All the complexity, energy and multiplicity was taken away and put into reinforcing all the same crap to placate and subdue all those sofa dwellers, shaking their heads along with all the condemnation and linear expected world, tutting and booing together against the evil men on the screen. 


At the same time it was terrible, some individuals lost property and were robbed and scared and disgusted; I saw it all on the news – I didn’t know any of these people and my experience was different, I don’t want to say that my experience is the real and genuine one and the one on the screen was a sanitised trite version intent on reinforcing the views of the audience, but fuck it I’m gonna, kapow; complexity, inspiration and anything new interesting and challenging about what was going on was wiped away.


People’s opinions on the matter after the fact were dreary for fear they have an original thought, stock phrases repeated over and over, blaming the people whose fault it was, whoever that was, and condemning all the senseless violence and destruction; where’s the violence and destruction full of sense? The stale interviews with the rioters full of bravado, made a brief appearance; I would like to see how different they would be if their mothers were also present during the interviews; they may not be as evil and violent as one was lead to believe. We were inundated with people playing roles, reinforcing that reality we are all so used to, there is no Other, we have incorporated it all. Step out of your own head and take a risk, see that shop window in your mind, keeping you from freedom and smash that git with a brick. To be a criminal. The Problem is freedom, self expression is seen in terms of having more things, nice trainers, this is the real crime, it’s all the wrong way around: to create should be our goal. This was what my Riot taught me.