The Dark Theatre

A Book About Loss

Alan Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000052237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del teatro

The Dark Theatre is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social Ecology.

The Dark Theatre returns to the bankrupted warehouse in Hope (Sufferance) Wharf in London's Docklands where Alan Read worked through the 1980s to identify a four-decade interregnum of 'cultural cruelty' wreaked by financialisation, austerity and communicative capitalism. Between the OPEC Oil Embargo and the first screening of The Family in 1974, to the United Nations report on UK poverty and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, this volume becomes a book about loss.

In the harsh light of such loss is there an alternative to the market that profits from peddling 'well-being' and pushes prescriptions for 'self-help', any role for the arts that is not an apologia for injustice? What if culture were not the solution but the problem when it comes to the mitigation of grief? Creativity not the remedy but the symptom of a structural malaise called inequality? Read suggests performance is no longer a political panacea for the precarious subject but a loss adjustor measuring damages suffered, compensations due, wrongs that demand to be put right. These field notes from a fire sale are a call for angry arts of advocacy representing those abandoned as the detritus of cultural authority, second-order victims whose crime is to have appealed for help from those looking on, audiences of sorts.

PART I

The loss adjustor

Collateral damage in the capitalocene

Loss does not travel well, if it travels at all. Loss is a ‘singular type of disappearance’ the ‘irreversible disappearance of some irreplaceable thing’, its singularity necessarily makes loss specific to something, someone, somewhere.¹ When I descend into the six-storey, galleried, subterranean auditorium to witness something called An Occupation of Loss in 2016, a performance work by Taryn Simon, I encounter a score of professional mourners, from Albania, Venezuela, Greece and China, whose laments rend the air.² But not for me. For someone, somewhere, I am not quite sure who. They are being paid now, by the miraculous producers Artangel, and they were paid then and there, by those who needed mourning and were able to pay for it. Judging by their watches and their shoes, some are mourners of very high esteem, there is no need for patronage here. In the absence of pity, critical thought can thrive.

A man in an overcoat with a hat stands in the flickering penumbra of an Ottawa house-fire lit only by the flames and the circling lights of the first responders. It is 1991. We don’t know the name nor occupation of this man but discover later he is Noah Render, an insurance adjuster. Where I am watching this film by Atom Egoyan we would call this figure, ‘the loss adjustor’, the one responsible for judging damages and compensation due.³ It is unlikely that we would consider this role to be anything more than an accounting of loss, an inventory of those things irrecoverable, recoverable and indeterminate in ashes. He may well take responsibility for the fire sale that follows, the knock-down recovery of any assets that will mitigate insurance losses. But in this film the actor Elias Koteas plays a part, hardly innocently called Render, in such a way as to insinuate himself into the emotional lives of those recently traumatised, to strip them of the only thing they have left, their dignity. He repeats the company slogan as a mantra through the film: ‘You may not know it yet, but you’re in shock’. In this insurance business the modus operandi appears to be seduction of the precariously grieving, and abuse of their trust. In the flicker of this film cynical reason can flourish.

In the grainy photograph from some time in 1917 a woman acquainted with style, confidently carrying off a broad belt and buckle, stands in front of a milliner’s shop in an East London street. She is the first woman in this neighbourhood to own her own tailoring business and she is about to lose it. Her husband has been gravely injured in the Great War and will return from his posting with the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment on 22 October 1917 to be nursed and die two years later.⁴ My grandmother will seek compensation for her loss from the War Office but the handwritten correspondence with the officials of the National Fund, running to several pages, will refuse her claim. She is asking for £350 in damages for the injuries that have ended her husband’s life and will necessitate the closure of her business. By the following year there is a new trader at 702 High Road Leyton.

My grandfather, a devout Catholic from a large, local working-class family, has visited and nursed my grandmother’s first husband, helping her write the letters whose pleas for support are ignored by the authorities. In these papers my grandfather has described my grandmother on the brink of the demise of her livelihood as ‘without capital and without stock’.⁵ They subsequently marry and move to Essex where, when my father dies, before I am born, my grandmother opens a small haberdashery shop to ‘keep my mother busy’ in her grief. My mother is her daughter. Two years after opening and thriving amongst the cotton reels in the early 1960s, my grandmother is persuaded to allow the prank television programme, Candid Camera to film a stunt in her shop involving unsuspecting customers. The shop loses its trade and closes the following year. No one got the fake-performance joke, and I haven’t since. It would be harsh to quote Oscar Wilde on the odds of losing not one but two means of living, but theatre has a habit of saying something careless when it matters.

Loss is ubiquitous to performance. There is no getting away from it. Nobody appears to have preserved the part of Aristotle’s Poetics dedicated to Comedy, it is the losses of Tragedy that have survived as far as critical thought is concerned. Walter Benjamin dedicated his post-doctoral study to ‘Trauserspiel’, The Origin of German Tragic Drama in the 16th and 17th centuries was precisely the movement of the mourning play. The entire discipline of performance study since its unruly inception in the 1960s has been built on the shaking foundations of loss. These tremors have sometimes taken the form of a debate about the live and the mediatised, that which loses itself at odds with that which endures. In its most limpid, and widely quoted formulation from 1993, Peggy Phelan put it like this: ‘Performance’s life is only in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance’.⁶ In other words: total loss, a right off. Nobody cites theatre theory, but almost everyone with some familiarity with the field knows this epithet.⁷ Yes, it has been contested and qualified, yet it remains, a searing catalogue of loss. But should it? The melancholy of theatrical discipline from Aristotle to Phelan via Benjamin might suggest loss is ubiquitous to performance, as though handling the damaged goods of ‘been and gone’ images is the necessary evil that comes with the job title of philospher, critic or cultural historian. But when set against the losses remembered above, unfelt losses, ambivalent losses, felt losses, is there not a deficit to be accounted for, some other less superfluous evil than aesthetic loss to consider?

That deficit is the balance sheet of this book. On the ledger there are blue and red entries as always. On the red side, those losses that have occurred. On the blue side, adjustments made by those who recognise such losses and offer up something of their own practice of loss-making performance to begin to compensate for what has gone before. This ledger is an accounting of what I will call the ‘capitalocene’, simply the long durée of a capitalist mode of production that has prevailed in Western Europe since the late fifteenth century.⁸ And this ledger is only necessary, in my view, because of the continuing existence of such an economic system, without it there would be no need for this accounting of the losses predicated by profits. To be clear, I certainly don’t think this system is ‘eternal’ and its very historical contingency, barely half a millennium and counting, undergirds the optimism of this writing.⁹

Theatre and its performances are peculiarly well-suited to the optimism of such compensations, acting through affects as they tend to do, they are commonly concerned with rendering present such past and future feelings. This is not to say for a moment, as indeed Peggy Phelan did in her upbeat subtitle to the book we have just sampled, Unmarked, that anything as instrumental as a ‘politics of performance’ can be achieved. But it is to recognise that in the active disjuncture between losses felt and compensatory actions taken, there arises a possibility for something else to happen. And it is the faltering attempt at such somethings, such essaying of means by which we might ‘begin again’, that the potential of performance is realised. In losing a comrade whose life-force was one of resolute optimism the glimmer of such dissenting ways might become apparent again. As Mark Fisher insisted against all odds: ‘The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again’.¹⁰ The Dark Theatre represents one hopeful accounting, or partial register, of such events, an open-ended repair book of ‘rends’ in the cultural fabric that call for work to be done in resistance to the confident prognoses of the closed book of capital that announces no such work is needed nor necessary. The liquidations common to the capitalocene will be expected here to flow in all, not just one, direction.

Given loss describes something that has by definition disappeared and therefore is not replaceable it is not a question of restoring what was, that is long gone, but rather asking, so what now, what to do in the interests of justice? The reason I could not feel for Taryn Simon’s professional mourners, other than enjoying them as virtuosi musicians and vocalists in a performance space (which has nothing to do with mourning per se) is that I knew not for what, or who, they mourned. My ignorance of their subjects of attention is of course the point. The obstacles to their being granted P-3 visas to perform in the US, and Tier 5 visas to allow ‘Creative and Sporting’ entry into the UK, are meticulously recorded and reproduced in a lavish programme distributed by Taryn Simon to make explicit what this piece is really about. And it is not in my view about mourning. That would be impossible, if not silly. The ‘what to do’ that The Occupation of Loss draws our attention to is, it turns out, something to do with the systemic State hostility to the outsider, in this instance the one who seeks entry to a ‘foreign field’ in order to lament the loss of those they left behind. Lucky are they who are accorded such recognition of lives lived. To attain such status of freedom to travel and perform, each mourner is required to establish that they are ‘culturally unique’.

The cultural theorist Judith Butler would get Taryn Simon. She reminds us that there are grievable and much less grievable lives, and grievability is strictly policed by a world-order of geo-political human accounting. The headline in The Times newspaper the day I am writing these words reads: ‘Sunbather nearly hit by falling body is Oxford graduate’.¹¹ I will not rename the well-educated graduate as he has already been identified as having his leisure disrupted by a figure that has fallen from the skies, from the undercarriage-well of a plane landing from Nairobi. An impression of the ‘stowaway’ is pictured in the newspaper column, a death mask compressed in the concrete garden path. And we already know something of his outline, as the au pair at the Clapham neighbours has told reporters: ‘I was doing gardening and I saw something in the sky – it looked like a drone’. Though I can see the rough outline and form of the figure, I cannot name the deceased because all we know is this is a human who has taken their dreadful life into their hands, secreted a blanket and some food in the wheel arch of the Kenya Airways Boeing 787, and hung on up to 22,000 feet when hypoxia would have started to kick in at minus 60 degrees Celsius, to within a mile or two of their promised landing at Heathrow. Scotland Yard police said it was ‘working to identify the stowaway’ though it is unlikely The Times will come back to us with the name when they do. The victim who was once special for someone, is no longer ‘culturally unique’, they have become part of a dreadful trend. This is the 100th human to fall from a long-haul flight in this way over the UK since records of this sordid kind began. Loss is sometimes brought home to us in ways that suggest, whether we like it or not, loss might have to travel. There is no alternative.

Loss can only be perceived as irreplaceable ‘from the viewpoint of an interested person’.¹² In the instance of the human being who fell to earth someone in Nairobi waits in vain. Closer to home, and therefore more imaginable, I am obviously a contender to be such an ‘interested person’ for my own grandmother. I am ashamed to admit I feel differently, less sympathetic to her husband, as pictured outside that same milliner’s shop, bow-tied, fob-chained, in a dapper wide-brimmed hat, before the war had started. It is relatively easy to be interested in relatives. It would appear to be far more nuanced to be interested in strangers and their fates. Not least of all those lamented by professional mourners. That figure in the garden is not afforded such ceremonial attention (the ‘traumatised’ sunbather becomes the headline obscuring the man with no name who fell). The recognition of necessary association with strangers is something that performance specialises in. It is unlikely after all before you went into the theatre and took your seat that you knew King Lear that well, but, notwithstanding his boorish behaviour, you might feel for him by the end of the play given the way two of his daughters treat him.

In the case of my grandmother, as one of the ones vested with remembering her, my writing here enters an economy of forgetting, as a resistance to the one who forgets, and in so forgetting ‘loses the loss’ (for good or ill). Memorialisation of the same Great War that bankrupted my grandmother, on its 100th anniversary in 2014–2018, provided opportunities for remembering, and no more so than for the cultural industries for whom memorialisation is a lavishly practiced, government-funded art.¹³ But, as Joe Kennedy and others have contested in nuanced readings of World War II ‘nostalgia’ and its political mobilisation from the platitudes of a poppy-past, the magnitude of this remembering in memorial multiples, began for some to elide rather than identify critical differences between say, the politics, economics and nationalist power plays of the Great War, and that fight against Fascism of World War II.¹⁴ It was as though for all the memorialisers’ best and most subtle artistic endeavours the necessity to remember the ‘fallen’ required those spectating to align themselves with principles of patriotism, nation and heroism that are as conflicted as they are problematic. The vastness of the military action itself began to be met by the vastness of the cultural response, whether a sea of ceramic blooms or a field of figurines, though in all cases the claim would be made that such scale was made up of multiple miniatures that adequately spoke to the detail of the disaster. The repeated cliché of ‘very moving...