This week I saw Tim Crouch’s new play “The Author,” directed by a smith and Karl James at the Royal Court. The run of the show is closing soon and is probably sold out, but for readers of this blog and people new to Crouch’s work take my advice and a. catch up on the man’s writing and b. catch the performances of his work whenever you can. No doubt “The Author” will be staged again within the next 9 months and you it’s not to be missed again. I look forward to seeing it in a different venue than the Royal Court, which seemed to play an important role in the piece’s overall meaning and certainly my reading of the performance. No doubt this incredible group of collaborators will apply equal intelligence and sensitivity when re-staging the work in a new venue as they did so expertly in London this week.

I wanted to write about the piece but not by detailing Crouch’s new play (often I find it difficult to articulate individual moments because they are often intimately linked to bigger and more complex ideas that need to be understood first.) I wanted to post a blog in response to the themes presented in the play, themes that seemed to be speaking directly to me as I embark on making The Hard Man for Snapshots (next month!) This play made me rethink my decisions about the project on a dramaturgical level and a practical level – Crouch, Smith and James require me as an audience member to engage, think, and reflect and often within a complex theatrical framework and that work – that work that I am being asked to do – makes Crouch’s performance’s rewarding. But they do that not by spoon-feeding me, patronizing me, or pointing out with a permissive wink/wank that I am in the room – I know that, thank you. Instead, they let me be inquisitive, confused, moved, and emotional in the privacy of my own spectatorship. Above all they let me work for meaning and find that meaning in myself. Crouch’s is a stage of opportunity for thoughtful spectatorship.

Dramaturgically this piece was highly nuanced, intelligent and brave. There were moments that on the face of it seemed obtuse, but whose function, if you will, in the piece was highly sophisticated and once understood gave even deeper meaning to the words that were being spoken – these moments were long musical interludes seemingly random in both tone and duration (though obviously not random at all but cleverly in reference to cultural norms), sequences of lighting and an absence of lighting that had no conventional relationship to an absent conventional “structure”, and audience participation that was traditional in form but not in the context of this “kind” of play. It was brave, ultimately, because it didn’t apologize for the being nuanced and intelligent and demanding of the spectator; it was brave because often theatre is so often self-conscious in a posture of apology and not the theatrical self-reflexivity of this piece – this piece was balanced beautifully between an inward glance that provoked me to reflect on the play’s themes, which were deeply embedded in both the performance’s text and dramaturgical devices, and between fictional storytelling that was totally gripping. But this storytelling was fragmented, it was self-referential, it was disjointed, it was referencing theatre and social histories that had been written in the last century of London theatre and British life.

And it asked me to look. To literally look with the eyes plugged into the front of my head at the bodies and textures and energies in the room at that moment and the inner-eye, the imagination’s sight was provoked to see outwardly images, stories, events, a stage, characters, moments in time – all imagined but just as clear and painfully vivid as what I saw (with my eyes) before me. This is the challenge of visual theatre that gives but mustn’t give too much. That must provoke but not indulge. That gives narrative but not patronizing bread crumbs. That challenges, emotionally and dramaturgically – and risks being misunderstood.

Thematically the work is aligned. This piece was, in my reading of it, a condemnation or warning!  that the hard man in us is the one that looks,  that looks willingly and again and demands to see again. Over time the hard man’s craving for the violence and images of this violence surfaces and transforms us. Not only do we no longer object/protest but we begin to hunger for, pursue, and, ultimately we are, transformed by this consumption. You are what you eat, even what you eat with the eyes – what you feed the mind and the heart. When I eat with my eyes the violent, pornographically violent images of our wars, abuses, degeneration, and environmental collapse, I eventually become hard and its harder to identify myself anymore. And then I become a maker of this violence and a producer of these images. It takes a hard man to know one and to hear this warning in “The Author.” All the hard men were disturbed….I hope.