Demon headmaster. Photo by Idil Sukan.
A stuffy lecture theatre, one of the many being put to anarchically good use around the fringe, is an apt setting for Sandy Grierson’s pedagogic journey into the heart of an imperious monster. This is the story of a forgotten avant-garde figure called Arthur Cravan (pronounced here as “craven”) a dandy, dilettante, showman and lothario; magazine editor, painter, boxer and DJ; who twists and turns through some of modernism’s key moments and players leaving a historical vapour trail which Grierson breathlessly plays showman with, invoking and dispelling it, as if the past was nothing but a dry-ice, and Grierson history’s magician.
Insisting that Cravan is his Great Grandfather, and that everything we hear tonight is true (“you with your ironic smile”, “I sense you think there’s metaphor here, there isn’t”, “you do believe me don’t you”, he entreats various audience members in his jocular conversational tone), Grierson hits slide after slide, snapping his fingers like a stylish Mariachi persuader, with an accompanying leaflet littered with quotes and obscure Youtube links (a nice moment comes where he almost dares us to get out our phones and check this stuff) reinforcing the verisimilitude of his relative with every clamber up and down the rows of desks.
Greyscale and Grierson have seized upon the notion that placing people in the action is the best way to tell a complicated story, and here he figuratively wires together audience members, “you can be Trotsky”, “you Apollinaire”, mapping triangular cordons of characters whose elusive semi-mythic relationships to one another, were they not made concrete in this way, would spiral off and lose even the most attentive of detectives. This sense of audience as centrifuge and narrative anchor is collusive and entertaining, and while for some, being told you are someone else while everyone stares on can clearly be an uncomfortable experience, Grierson is quick with the prefixes that reassure, the “great heavyweight Jack Johnson”, the “master of modern art Duchamp”.
And its this teacherly patience and encouragement which sets the scene for the piece’s biggest coup, because while the story of Cravan is lively enough, whipped along, spry and wiry, like a pleasantly fast-paced whodunnit; it is the central performance that really gives this play it’s memorable character. With smoky hints of seance, and slightly grandiose mentions of transubstantiation Grierson, adopting a plush fur and bowler hat, sets about instantiating the man. There is a slight nervous tension to Grierson as a performer, his luminous eyes with their imploring rims, his quick movements, suggest something ontologically light. And yet there are only brief moments of the final ten minutes in which you remember that Grierson’s biceps are 12 inches in diameter and Cravan’s 19, as he raises himself up to full height, and drawing perhaps on all the malevolence of shyness, becomes something abominable, sneeringly and snortingly dominant. While he held our hands all the way through, now he crushes them in a hypnotically tight grip. Where before we were playing along, now we are dispensed with, our centrifuge washed away in a seething tsunami of vicious individualism and pent-up contempt.
The pedagogical thread is not entirely abandoned however, when this demon headmaster enjoins us with his existential motto; “life has no solution. You have to learn to dream it more carefully.” In this lecture theatre certain forces of history are unveiled, narrative is trumped by the performance of Will. It’s not an edifying account, yet it is a very powerful one. “We are all craven” Grierson/Cravan says to us at one moment; but some more so than most.
