Introduction: Tim Crouch, The Author, and the Audience – A Forum

Introduction

In an August 2010 Guardian blog posting titled ‘The Author: Edinburgh's most talked about play’, critic Charlotte Higgins attempted to sum up the notoriety that was growing around a relatively short, text-based performance in which four people simply sit and talk amongst and to their audience:

If there's one play at Edinburgh this year thatkeeps rattling around in the brain days after you've seen it, if there's one play that conversations keep turning back to in bars andqueues, it's The Author, Tim Crouch's play that turns its attention to the role of the spectator in art and life. Disturbing both in itsform and content, it had a deliberately unobtrusive run at the Royal Court in September 2009 […] It's in the festival atmosphere of Edinburgh, though, where theatregoers are thrown together, that the conversation about the play is really growing. ¹

Higgins then goes on to muse on the reasons for the play's unexpected impact on audiences, before concluding – in an invitation for responsive comments – that ‘I'm still not entirely sure what I think about The Author, and I've deliberately waited nearly a week to let things settle, at least a bit, before writing this’. Just how often, in our high-speed era, does a journalist wait that long before committing thoughts to the page?

It was apparent from the outset of the play's performance life that this was an unusually powerful, haunting piece of work, and something that audiences would want to – indeed, had to – talk about, unpack, think through. Iwas lucky enough to witness a very early run-through, in a rehearsal room at the Royal Court in May 2009, played at lunch-time to members of the theatre's staff. It became apparent immediately afterwards that very few of those present were going to be returning to their office duties that afternoon. There was an almost shell-shocked sense thatpeople needed to take time out and de-pressurise – that, in the words of Bob Dylan, ‘something is happening, but you don't know what it is’. ² Two years on, I am – I must confess – still not sure quite what happened, and, like Higgins, I am not entirely sure what I think about the play, if, by that, one means having a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feeling about it, one way or the other. The Author is so complex and undecidable a work that it resists co-option to that kind of reductive, ‘two thumbs up’ review mentality. So when Crouch began planning the play's autumn 2010 tour, I proposed to him that a formal symposium event – held in conjunction withits performances at the University of Leeds' Workshop Theatre – might be an appropriate way to reflect collectively on whatever ‘it’ was.

The symposium, titled ‘The Author and the Audience’, took place on 6 November 2010, and attracted participants from all over the UK. Most of the contents of this Forum arise directly from that event, and I am very grateful to Maria Delgado and her colleagues at Contemporary Theatre Review for seeing the value in documenting the proceedings in this way – and thereby keeping the conversation going now that the play's performance journey is over (at least for the foreseeable future). Another concern is to make this debate around The Author available to an international audience: Crouch is now, as Maria put it to me, ‘a major figure whose model is impacting beyond the UK theatre scene’, ³ but because The Author requires a cast of four (rather than the one or two of his previous, widely travelled plays), and thus runs into tricky issues around international Equity contracts, its overseas touring life has, to date, been somewhat limited.

‘The Author and the Audience’ was constructed as a two-way conversation between academic critics and theatre practitioners – with presenters including Crouch himself, Alex Chisholm, Helen Freshwater, Chris Goode, Helen Iball, Claire MacDonald, Liz Tomlin, a smith and Chris Thorpe. This blend of contributors, also reflected in the articles that follow here, was assembled in conscious response to a comment of Crouch's three years earlier – during Workshop Theatre's Performing Literatures conference ⁴  – when he observed that the balance of artists and critics in attendance was heavily weighted towards the latter, and that a still more challenging debate might arise if the scales were balanced more evenly. Crouch's point was consistent with a more general, philosophical concern – outlined clearly in his interview with Seda Ilter included here – to ‘democratise’ the terms of any cultural exchange; to resist the habitual hierarchies of dynamic artist over passive audience, or of intellectual critique over intuitive creative expression. It is not that we are ‘all the same’, but that we are all participants in a multi-sided exchange. And so it was that critic Helen Freshwater, leading off the keynote panel at the symposium, found herself sitting alongside Tim Crouch and The Author's co-director a smith. This was the first time, she noted in her preamble, that she had ever given a paper while sitting next to the people she was talking about. Should that, we might ask ourselves, be so unusual? The ensuing CTR Forum seeks to stage an encounter around a particular work, between those who have made it and some of those who have witnessed and participated in its performance. This methodology might be one for our discipline to consider applying more broadly.

The Forum opens with Seda Ilter's interview with Crouch, ‘A Process of Transformation’. The only piece here that did not arise from the Author symposium (it was submitted independently to the journal), it focuses primarily on Crouch's first play My Arm (2003). As such, however, it provides a very useful overview of some of Crouch's motivating concerns as an actor-playwright – which found their first, and, in some respects, purest expression in My Arm, and have subsequently been redeveloped in ever-more-complex variationsin his other three plays for adult audiences, An Oak Tree (2005), ENGLAND (2007) and, most recently, The Author. Ilter also provides a helpful commentary of her own in the remarks that introduce the interview, particularly with regard to the actor's function in Crouch's plays, as a relatively neutral canvas onto which the audience paints its own emotional responses.

Next up are three pieces that – in effect – restage that opening, keynote panel at the symposium. Helen Freshwater's short essay ‘You Say Something’, though reworked for publication here, retains the punchy, provocative form it took on the day, and raises some key questions about what we mean by ‘audience participation’. Much has been made, she notes, of Punchdrunk's provision of masks to their audience members, providing them with the kind of anonymity that encourages them to overcome inhibitions and engage more freely with the immersive environments of the company's performances. The Author, by contrast, requires little or no physical or verbal contribution from its spectators – other than to be visibly present, unmasked, as ourselves. As Freshwater suggests, our participation is arguably all the more profound as a result. Her paper is followed by a smith's ‘Gentle Acts of Removal, Replacement, and Reduction’, which carefully explores the very conscious way in which audience engagement is considered during the collaborative process of directing Crouch's work. He and co-director Karl James, smith proposes, function in effect more as enquiring audience members than as creatively assertive agents in their own right.

In his three-part article ‘Response and Responsibility’, Crouch himself then presents and reflects on some of the (surprisingly assertive) audience feedback he has received in the form of letters sent following performances of The Author. Here we can trace, in three different temporal moments (the middle section is the short paper Crouch presented atthe symposium, while the first and third parts pre- and post-date it), the author's own attempts to understand and embrace some of the more vehement responses his play has provoked. Immediately following Crouch's piece is ‘A Conversation about Dialogue’ – a document composed from edited transcription of discussions that took place at the symposium. This is an attempt to capture some of the open discussion provoked, in particular, by Crouch's presentation of audience letters, and the questions arising about how spectator feedback is solicited, permitted and valued.

There then follow two extended critical articles which attempt to articulate in detail some of the rich complexities of Crouch's work and its modes of engaging with audiences. In its conference-paper form, Helen Iball's ‘A Mouth to Feed Me’ was one of the highlights of the symposium (Crouch later described it in a Guardian article as ‘outstanding’ ⁵ ). Iball adopts the unorthodox strategy of reading The Author and its reception through the lens provided by its poster image – a line drawing of a usurping cuckoo chick being fed by a much smaller parent bird. Adopting an associative strategy that links place of performance, casting decisions, performer interviews and verbatim audience feedback, Iball's essay generates a cumulative critique that suggests still further angles for subsequent analysis. It is followed by my own contribution here, ‘Materialising the Audience’, which considers The Author alongside Crouch's preceding play ENGLAND, looking at the ways in which they respond to the ‘site specifics’ of being commissioned for performance in, respectively, the Royal Court Theatre and Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery. The essay draws on critical sources ranging from John Berger to Jacques Rancière, to consider some of the ‘ways of seeing’ into which Crouch's ‘emancipated spectators’ are interpolated and implicated.

The Forum closes with Chris Goode's contribution, ‘The Audience is Listening’. Goode's position in relation to The Author is an intriguing one, as a playwright and theatre-maker who joined the cast of Crouch's playin2010, taking over in the key, ‘spectator’ role played at the Royal Court by another independent artist, Adrian Howells. Goode's widely read blog had discussed The Author and its reception in Edinburgh and on tour in considerable detail, but for his symposium presentation – a version of which is reproduced here – he opted to speak ‘in proximity’ of Crouch's play rather than directly about it. Assembling reflections on a number of his ownrecent projects, Goode presents an allusive, performative essay that resonates with and expands on several of the key concerns discussed elsewhere in the Forum. He concludes with textual material, drawn from an in-the-dark performance at Tate Modern, in which an author/speaker directly questions his audience/listeners about what exactly they are doing in the ostensible ‘privacy’ of their silent observing. In fusing the critical and creative so seamlessly, Goode's piece makes for an apt conclusion to this Forum's attempts to mingle the voices of artists and scholars, in speaking about, around, and to the ‘something [that] ishappening’ during performances of The Author.

Notes

Charlotte Higgins, ‘The Author: Edinburgh's most talked-about play’. Guardian blog post, 12 August 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2010/aug/12/edinburghfestival-theatre [accessed 30 June 2011].

Bob Dylan, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man', Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia CH 90326, 1965).

From email correspondence with the author, July 2011. Crouch offers a model in which the stage activity itself is simplified or purified down to one or two actors with few props or set, using only language to conjure narrative and action in the audience's imaginations: what Crouch refers to as minimalizing what is happening on stage in order to ‘maximize what is happening in the audience’. (Tim Crouch, quoted in Stephen Bottoms, ‘Authoring the Audience: The Conceptual Drama of Tim Crouch’, Perfornamce Research, 14 (Spring 2009), 65–76 (p. 69).

The Performing Literatures conference took place at the University of Leeds between 29 June and 1 July, 2007. Selections from its proceedings were subsequently published under the same title in an edition of Performance Research, 14 (March 2009), co-edited by Stephen Bottoms and Richard Gough.

See Tim Crouch, ‘Death of the Author: How Did My Play Fare in LA?’ Guardian blog, 7 March 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/mar/07/tim-crouch-the-author-la-tour [accessed 30 June 2011].