Reviews OWE & Fringe Published 17 May 2011

Reykjavik

The Albany ⋄ 11th May - 14th May 2011 (on tour)

A chilly experience of interactive theatre

Daniel B. Yates

A chill wind blows

Dressed head-to-toe in white overalls, wearing goggles, and staring at a white sheet, we confronted two futures.  One of the possibility of adventure and discovery: the other a glimpse of a well of boredom so deep you could flip a coin and watch it spinning forever.  An interactive piece about possible futures and neglected pasts, this was Reykjavik.  The sheet, we were told was, a glacier the surface of which had over decades accreted enough contaminants to kill you should you drink its water.  We were scientific observers, perhaps. Invited to forensically appraise a young man’s life, beginning with quotidian objects, which would become part of the  story: a packet of cigarettes, souvenirs from Monmartre, giving way to a whirl of action and cryptic longing.

Jonathan Young, who devised and wrote the piece, played our host Y; an excitable geek with various loosely wrought fascinations. His babbling enthusiasm spilled into physical exaggerations – struggling against the wind, skiing, swimming, losing himself on the dancefloor. Young’s training under Jacques Lecoq brought dynamism and stylised life into the sterile white box erected at halfmast in Deptford’s swishly metallic theatre-in-the-round.   A slightly mundane panoramic finale notwithstanding, projections were used smartly, with numeric scrolling patinas, fuzzy lights, aerial shots of the island.   A sparse array of props created adumbrations of domestic spaces, institutional spaces, outdoor wide open spaces.  Lights through opaque goggles gave a sense of profound lostness. We were displaced by foreign language, nudged into strangeness, exilic in nowhere space.  We were required to take part in an existential dance lesson, in which we physically enact the choosing of futures.  We were sat, at odd angles to one another, and infinitely replicated in a hall of mirrors.

When two mirrors are placed facing one another in a vacuum, moved ever closer they begin to attract. This is known as the Casimir effect, empirical proof of quantum theory’s claim that vacuums are not empty, but rather contain low-level energy.  Perhaps there is a metaphor here for much interactive theatre.  In our relative inertness with regard to the plot and its outcomes, manoeuvred around the stage, we become like low-level energies; present but lesser.  As we are addressed in a variety of ways, like the virtual particles that Heisenberg saw in the vacuum, we become unstable, uncertain as to our roles, elusive to ourselves.  The mirrors are pushed closer together, and we are manipulated for effect, in a labyrinth of someone else’s devising.

The breaking of the “fourth wall”, an old technique of the avant-garde, all too often comes dripping through the ceilings of our theatrical ambition like a hippy’s wet dream.   Chip away at its claims and you will frequently reveal the same pseudo-emancipatory logic; that to be released from the bondage of the stalls is somehow globally improving. To be bodily and spatially available is to experience the effects of art in a more profound way. To refuse this is  to be overly guarded, to accept your own retardation. All this rhetoric secures the borders of what become small provinces, more often than not governed by the politically confused.

Even moreso than the hippies, as many have noted, it was the Nazis that were those great and enthusiastic joiners-in.  Trying to make sense of it afterwards I was asked if I felt robotic. I suppose that had I been mechanised from birth, then I probably wouldn’t have reacted so badly to an hour of obedience to an external narrative will.  I became itchy, like a school kid.  Part of the wonder of being a school kid is imagining the moment when you no longer have to be one. A second relief is knowing the forces that minutely structure your days have gaps and limits: bike sheds, toilets, dope stuffed in ties.  But in the shifting confines of the piece, it is the event, the only event, to which you must be ever-present and always participating.  Here, in a small sense, we were slaves watching the master but with no possibility of overcoming; I felt confounded, like I was caught in a stalled dialectic. A pervasive sense that this was in some way an anti-democratic space.

The case needs to be made that behind the fourth wall is not inert space, that traditional audiences do not hide. As a seated audience you can be as active as you like. Your identifications rove and your desires play. You agree; reject; select; fastening on to the things which captivate the imagination. You tug at knots and join dots. You are reflective and introspective. Buffeted and absorbed. Imperceptibly, and sometimes dramatically, you alter and have altered your understanding of the world. Ultimately you are producing your own reading. You can also withdraw: abandon yourself to pleasure and spectacle, or simply wander off in your mind, to the next washing machine load, to people you want to screw, to people you want screw on washing machines.  Performers and producers that don’t understand this are often too beguiled by the spotlight to think that an audience can exist outside of it.

In some ways Reykjavik was not a prime offender.  Its emphasis on the physicality of the performer in our relatively lumpen midst was successful.  Its economy of audience direction, its unobtrusive use of props – all made for a streamlined piece. The depersonalising effects of the uniforms and white chamber, and the multiple modes of address, were carefully calibrated and smartly structured. Young came across as capable actor and facilitator, without Y ever quite cohering as a character: either as a human presence, or a set of ideas and questions.  At the heart of the piece Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo was quoted twice, “futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches”. But these futures were confined and narrow, revolving around questions of which city to live in, which love life to pursue – caught between personal agency and the void.  A reductive view of futures, one that we were all obliged to participate in, to the very end.

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Daniel B. Yates

Educated by the state, at LSE and Goldsmiths, Daniel co-founded Exeunt in late 2010. The Guardian has characterised his work as “breaking with critical tradition” while his writing on live culture &c has appeared in TimeOut London, i-D Magazine, Vice Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in London E8, and is pleasant.

Reykjavik Show Info


Directed by Carolina Valdes and Lucinka Eisler

Written by Jonathan Young

Cast includes Jonathan Young

Link http://www.shams.org.uk/productions/book-tickets

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