Yesterday 24th February 2207. I experienced total theatre, a farce, a comedy and a satire, also a melodrama, drama, mystery and a thriller which included an operatic aria, operatic duet, rock and pop and karaoke, a comprehensive exploration of language, voice and speech, which included an education into the reality of film making, and a complex story where every cause and consequence becomes explained and every question answered.
Not surprisingly the performance last approximately four and half hours, excluding two intervals.
The quality of the work and the quality of the performance was outstanding. Only the ending disappointed although this is a work still in creation and therefore the present conclusion which felt rushed and failed to realise the expectation of its opening.
The work? Lipsynch led by Robert Lepage and a collaboration between Ex Machina, and Theatre sans Frontieres with Cultural Industries Lid and Northern Stage
Theatrical Art is a conduit between those creating the work and everyone who interacts with the performance, each bringing to the event their anticipation, immediate circumstance and previous experience. My experience over the past year has confirmed an impression that the majority of an audience select to attend because of the performance type with the musical being much in fashion and the Shakespearean classical commanding both an established, and an ever changing young audience studying English Literature. True there are those who attend out of curiosity or because they are taken by someone, or are, or hope to be active in the creative and performing process, and those who follow the work of a company or that of an individual performer.
The nature of audience participation appears to be governed by the preponderance of those who know in advance the form of the work. If branded a comedy people will look to laugh at every opportunity and if a musical they will give applause at the end of each number. The performance of the opening of Lipsynch, an operatic aria deserved a standing ovation, which I hope would have been given if performed in an opera house, or billed as an opera, but was met with silence at the Northern Stage. Is this an over reaction from someone who four years ago changed his life as a consequence of a day divided between the Saatchi MOMA and Tate Modern? My emotional being remains raw and open.
Since the commencement of 2007 I have attended three forms of live performance. I have been among 50000 at events where the majority paid months in advance up to four times the maximum of a Lipsynch ticket cost, and where a greater number than the total audience for the week, paid even more for tickets to a single event. The expectation of the majority of these audiences indicates that they anticipated to be frustrated and disappointed by the experience, but attended because they had already paid or lived in hope of something better. In reality they received perhaps a 10th, perhaps a 100th of what the Lipsynch experience provided.
There was a time, until about a decade ago, when the audience at these performances were active participants giving voice in song and shout to prejudice and hostility, of a foul and offensive nature, towards half the performers, the director and some of the supporting production staff and towards a separated section of the audience. Some ignored the performers and concentrated on self expression. This aspect of the audience participation has been successfully suppressed, although it is evidently just below the surface. Two exceptions are still allowed, hostility shown towards performers based in London and their supporters from where ever they live, or when the neighbouring team and supporters visit. This season there has also been the unthinkable, mass booing of home performers. Whereas in the past the nature of audience participation reflected local tribal loyalty to performers, now the performers are of international origin, frequently changing their loyalty between production teams and sometimes none of the performers having any link with the with the audience locality.
I also attended a performance event of 10000, repeated over two days, where the audience also paid more than the top price Lipsynch for a ticket, having previously invested tens of pounds over ten weeks in voting for individual performers. The noise level of the performances was so high that the quality of the sound was adversely affected, but was necessary because the noise level of the audience, (with one notable exception), and where some performers gave this kind of participation every encouragement, by calling on the audience to support, even to the extent of putting on city football shirts, which was brave because of its regional nature. Afterwards there were universal expressions of enjoyment and money's worth. The final performer deserved several standing ovations, but the audience was of the wrong composition and mood but her time will come when the cost of seat will be priceless.
Whereas men and teenagers are predominate in the 50000 events, women, girls and children were predominant among the 10000, and where I suspect I was the oldest present. This all contrasted with the third event where the audience was under 500, and the seat price less than maximum at Lipsynch, despite the performer being of international good reputation over four decades. Because the audience knew the work of the performer well, they listened intently and then gave applause, sometimes prolonged, at appropriate points after each number, and standing in ovation at the end.
The events were Newcastle United AFC, the X Factor finalists show tour and Ritchie Havens, also on tour.
I had no previous knowledge of the Ex Machina company, or the work of Robert Lepage, who initiated the concept, except for the Northern stage advance publicity, and despite having planned to do so, work activities prevented internet research. I had attended a performance in Spanish by Theatre San Frontieres, (a company, collaborating with Ex Machina) and which brought back memories of having been brought up six decades earlier in a Gibraltarian speaking household in England who did not teach me their language. I had also seen all the theatrical productions at the Playhouse since its re-opening, except for those designed for children. Northern Stage had become a partner in planning the Lipsynch theatrical production. My only expectation about the form of Lipsynch was that it might be like the Performance Art of 'Exquisite Pain' (the Enforced Theatre Company) and where at the end of their 'World in Pictures,' chorus warns the audience that whatever the immediate response to a work, it quickly becomes submerged by the layers of subsequent experience.
This seems to me to be particularly true for those who visit the theatre as part of their consumption culture. Those who do not want to feel uncomfortable and challenged by the eyeball experience of human beings baring the soul of others, and through them their own, stay away. The young woman in Exquisite Pain recounts over and over again, mirroring the linear passage of time, what happened one night when she was dumped by a lover, the memory of the details and of the emotions aroused, changes, at first only slightly, and then significantly because of subsequent experience. Most people cannot cope with such reality, and even less prepared to pay for such an experience.
This is a Blog and Blog asks for moods to be indicated and was there not a play about people going to and leaving a play. My mood has been euphoric having celebrated the 100th birthday of my mother, who despite severe memory loss with psychosis, is generally happy. The mood has been dampened by receiving two reports from the Health Ombudsman regarding the premature and preventable death of her sister, and my care mother, four years ago, and which required, and will require of me, more time, and distress.
I made no attempt to search for a review in advance or until I have completed this writing of my experience and reaction. I was very intrigued by the brief reference in advance publicity to the 'search for father in western society,' and was stunned when the story line struck so many chords with my own background, with my former professional work, and which had continued after retirement after 2003. Having a discovered Mediterranean ancestry, primarily Spanish and Maltese, with some Italian and English Wiltshire, also raised personal interest levels because the work involves parts where the first language is German, French, Italian and Spanish, used to explore aspects of language and communication, and how digital communication and digital gadgetry can be used to overcome all differences, including those of distance.
I had not anticipated that the work would have any coherent story line, and therefore one which attempts to explain and resolve all issues was unexpected. An opera singer, en route is asked to hold the baby of a young mother who suddenly dies. The woman adopts the child, and part of the story is the relationship between a boy who does not know anything about his father and then finds a relationship with a step father difficult, and where one proposition is that young men are jealous and threatened by their fathers. The work explores who the girl was, and how she came to be on flight with the child, and how and when, the son comes to also learn the truth of his mother and of his parentage. Substitute parents always attempt to protect, usually for good reasons, while the child in question has a lifelong need to know, even if they come to wish they never did (The Bad Mother's Handbook of Kate Long should be the bible on this). Part of my creative work since retirement has been about what happens when late in life you discover that your ancestral identity is different from what you were led to believe and with the added irony that one aspect of my occupational activity involved helping others to gain the truth of their biological identity.
Another theme which struck several chords is the proposition that there is a multiplicity of causes and consequence for each event existing in parallel dimensions. I wrote my first and only attempt at a play in 1960 after volunteering to complete six months in prison in preference to entering into a recognisance to keep the peace which involved stopping my work as an independent non violent, weapons of mass destruction inspector, in Essex, and elsewhere. The play was sent to the English Stage company at the Royal Court, and unsurprisingly rejected, although a note was added, " However, they (their readers) did feel that your play was interesting and consequently we would be very pleased to read anything else you may have written."
I had not completed anything and instead of devoting all my energy to doing so, I chose to move through a series of related portals away from active artistic creativity, into further education, professional training, child care social work and child care work and then social services management. In 1985 I was advised, while attending an international residential senior management course, that I was a creative intellect working in an unsympathetic environment which although confirmed what I knew, added analysis and implications which I did not. It was not until a sequence of related events spread over less than the year 2002-2003 that I decided to cross back through an open portal into the dimension of artistic creativity, as a contemporary concept and installation worker, having discovered that throughout the previous decades others had been thinking and doing what I had been thinking, and to a less extent, doing, in my separate dimension. Lipsynch is divided into potentially self contained one act dimensions with refer and link into the others. At times you are puzzled despite close attention, especially with the significance of the fourth act, and where those sitting immediate behind me also had the same problem, and I am still not certain about the value of this act except as used to explore aspects of communication and understanding surrounding social and ritual behaviour towards death, and to give another slant on father son relationships.
I was much more at home and impressed by the lead and other characters involved in the unmasking of child/young person abusers, knowing from personal experience how victims are for ever haunted and lack any meaningful sense of justice, while some, not only victims, will ruthlessly and obsessively seek to unmask and punish.
I am impressed by the technical integrity and sensitivity in which the subject was treated and which for me was at heart of the Lipsynch story taking precedence over the search for father.
In Lipsynch it seemed to me that the father was demonised with no explanation attempted why he had come to behave as he had, although I wondered if we were expected to understand this from the behaviour of the son, and what happens when father sees himself in the mirror through the presence of his son: Look into the abyss and! There was evidently much serious attempt to explain and link the behaviour of everyone else.
After 24 hours I consider the opening act to be one of the most powerful and moving experiences I have encountered in the theatre. I thought the performance of the opening aria without build up extraordinary. Given the quality of the subsequent individual plays and performances I was disappointed with the finale which I had expected to be at least as powerful and moving as the opening, whereas the emphasis appeared to be on providing an explanation and resolution. I had expected at least an aria leaving the audience in silence, challenged. Perhaps a quintet of the five languages, synchronised in harmony to indicate the provision of a go home contentment from resolved ending, only to be followed by discordant Babel to remind of reality? True this aspect was there in the restaurant scene and the making of the autobiographical film.
I remain puzzled by the emphasis on one explanation and one resolution given the proposition of a multiplicity of causes for each event and outcome although this may have been part of the grand design, having educated the audience through the artificiality of film making with the possibility of adding and changing every component separately, and as was also done through the creation of the railway station announcement. Perhaps my reaction is related to having expected the work to more abstract and where in the end there are no answers and when those which appear to have been are opened out to more questions.
I am not sure if the attempt to be all things to all and to undertake such a comprehensive exploration of the use of voice, speech and language added to the value of the core concept. As I tried to demonstrate in my introduction it is possible to create and develop a popular cultural performance experience with the public paying in several ways for the same event, enabling high wages and corporate profit. I also tried to demonstrate my difficulty in sustaining quality and consistency over increasing length. Whether intended or not Lipsynch communicated the extent to which technology enables greater consistency and comprehensiveness through the use creation of the Train station announcements and ways of building up the segment of a film by separately adding/changing artists, sound and voice.
My problem with the present production of Lipsynch is that I did not find the totality as satisfying or challenging as the first act led me to anticipate and because of the overall quality of the components and the performances. In singling out the actor who portrayed the operatic singer and substitute mother, and the actor who covered the old woman, the camp hairdresser and the detective, this is not to downgrade the work of everyone else. The removal of the brain tumour was excruciatingly magnificent. But most of all I shall never forgot that opening aria and the difficulty I had not to cry.
