A Mouth To Feed Me: Reflections Inspired by the Poster for Tim Crouch's The Author

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point the poster image for Tim Crouch's play The Author (Royal Court Theatre, 2009, and touring 2010-11), aline drawing by Julia Collins featuring a usurping cuckoo chick being fed by a much smaller ‘parent’ bird. The essay considers various ways in which the cuckoo metaphor might be seen to apply to - and shed light on - the play, its performances at the Royal Court, its performance style, and its performers. The essay draws on one-on-one interviews conducted by the writer with members of The Author company, and on documentation of verbatim audience feedback at the Royal Court.

Notes

From my conversation with Tim Crouch (Newcastle, 7 October 2010), one of six such conversations about The Author, funded by the British Academy. The others were as follows: with actor Vic Llewellyn (Newcastle, 7 October 2010); with actor Esther Smith (Newcastle, 7 October 2010); with stage managers Bryony Drury and Fran O'Donnell (London, 13 October 2010); with actor Adrian Howells (Glasgow, 21 October 2010); with co-director a smith (Leeds, 5 November 2010). Unattributed quotations throughout this essay are from these sources. Substantial extracts transcribed from the conversations are available online at www.theatrepersonal.co.uk.

The Author premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Sloane Square, London on Wednesday 23 September 2009. Its run at the Royal Court was 23 September – 24 October 2009. The Author toured in 2010 as follows: 5–29 August, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; 1–2 September, Korjaamo Culture Factory, Helsinki; 8–10 September, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton; 24–25 September, The North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford; 28 September–2 October, Theatre Royal, Bristol; 6–8 October, Northern Stage, Newcastle; 12–15 October, The Cube@Project, Dublin; 19–23 October, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry; 28–29 October, TRAFÓ House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; 5–6 November, The Workshop Theatre, Leeds; 10–13 November, The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre; 16–20 November, Royal Exchange, Manchester; 23–25 November, Culturgest, Lisbon. In 2011: 15–27 February, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles.

Julia Collins is a graphic designer and, in a variation on the theme of The Author's poster image, her first novel, Cuckoo, is due to be published in 2011. Collins is married to Tim Crouch. ‘Jules’ is referred to by ‘Tim’ in The Author.

The poster images are as follows: for ENGLAND, a photograph by Steve Payne of ‘The Heart’ by Jane Prophet. ‘The Heart’ is described on the flyer for ENGLAND as ‘silver on copper plated rapid prototype of healthy human heart’. Graphicdesign is by Julia Collins. See http://www.newsfromnowhere.net/wp-content/uploads/ 2009/01/flyer.pdf [accessed 11 January 2011]. For An Oak Tree, theimage is of a hypnotist and his subject, with pink arrows.Graphic design is by Julia Collins. See http://www.newsfromnowhere.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ oaktree_flyer.pdf [accessed 11 January 2011]. Both plays opened at the Edinburgh Festival and have toured internationally. See www.newsfromnowhere.net for details of past and upcoming tours.

Tim Crouch, The Author (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 16.

Helena Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 18. Grehan's description of Levinasian responsibility is, in the context of her discussion at this point, related to her experience of Le Dernier Caravansérail, part II ‘Origines et destins’.

Ibid., p. 6. Grehan identifies as informing her work Emmanuel Levinas' Otherwise than Being Or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999) and his Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998) – and, ‘to a lesser extent’, Zygmunt Bauman's Postmodern Ethics (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993).

Ibid., p. 14.

Ibid., pp. 13–14.

Tim Birkhead, ‘The Cuckoo: a Cheat, a Thief and a Killer: Documentary Uncovers Macabre Truth about How the Familiar Spring Visitor Exploits its Victims’, Independent, 9 January 2009.

Stephen Bottoms, ‘Authorising the Audience: The Conceptual Drama of Tim Crouch’, Performance Research, 14 (Spring 2009), 65–76 (p. 71).

Birkhead, ‘The Cuckoo’.

Crouch, The Author, p. 17.

Throughout this essay, transcripts of audience responses are extracted from show reports produced by the stage manager Fran O'Donnell. I am grateful to Fran for providing a sample of these reports for my research. My analysis of the material contained in the sample, along with further transcripts, is available online at www.theatrepersonal.co.uk. The second response quoted in the main body of this essay, from performance 16, was in response to ‘Vic's’ question ‘what do you think?’ and reflects the perception of bonding being encouraged between spectators, by the actors and the play (and instigated by ‘Adrian’).

Crouch, The Author, p. 17.

Ibid., p. 19.

Adrian Howells, ‘The Burning Question #3: What's it like washing feet every day?’, posted 16 August 2009 at http://fest.theskinny.co.uk/article/96651-the-burning-question-adrian-howells [accessed 20 December 2010].

Adrian Howells: The Art of Being Adrienne, posted 10 March 2006 at http://www.cascpp.lancs.ac.uk/pages/eventspages/adrienne.htm [accessed 3 November 2010].

Bottoms, ‘Authorising the Audience’, p. 67.

Names of spectators have been changed throughout. Gendering – name ascribed in relation to biological sex – has been maintained.

Elin Diamond, ‘Mimesis, Mimicry and the True-Real’, Modern Drama, 32 (Spring 1989), 59–72.

Moe Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge, 1994).

Kate Davy, ‘Fe/Male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp’, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 355–69 (p. 369).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Kleptoparasitism#p005lnwg [accessed 9 March 2011].

http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/ [accessed 26 November 2010]. This material was available online during, and for some months after, the British Council's Connected: Interactive Performing Arts from the UK showcase in Tokyo (1–4 March 2010). The British Council website explains that ‘during the lifespan of the project, the Connected website acted as a hub for people to discuss and debate the artists, their work, the audience and the event itself’. A short contextualisation and summary of Connected is available at http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-connected.htm [accessed 3 May 2011]. The Connected artists: Andy Field, Adrian Howells, Billy Cowie, Blast Theory, Coney, Duncan Speakman, Gob Squad, Hide&Seek, Melanie Wilson, Rotozaza, Stan's Cafe, Stoke Newington International Airport, Third Angel, Tim Crouch.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 94, emphasis as in original.

Crouch, The Author, p. 32.

Ibid., p. 47.

I proffered the image as a talking point in my series of six conversations with the company. Usually this felt most appropriate towards the end of the 60–90-minute session, which meant that participants tended to respond to the image in ways that encapsulated the key trajectories of their experiences as they had described them to me in the preceding conversation. Though the phrasing varied a little, my first question about the poster ran along the lines of ‘what do you see in this image? What does it mean to you?’ and my second question was usually ‘if a part of that picture was you, what part would it be?’ or sometimes ‘do you feel like either one of those birds at any point in the show, or does it switch?’ Transcripts of the conversations, including reflections upon these questions, are available at theatrepersonal.co.uk.

See Bottoms, ‘Authorising the Audience’.

Crouch, The Author, p. 59.

Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48 (p.148).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Reading The Satanic Verses’, in The Postmodern Arts ed. by Nigel Weale (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 221–42 (p. 221).

Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 145.

Spivak, ‘Reading The Satanic Verses’, p. 222.

Crouch, The Author, p. 58.

Deirdre Heddon, ‘Personal Performance: the Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker’, in Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. by Jo Gill (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 137–53 (p. 137).

Tim Crouch writing about the end of the tour at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/mar/07/tim-crouch-the-author-la-tour [accessed 16 April 2011].

See Bottoms, ‘Authorising the Audience’, p. 67.

Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1994 [1964]), p. 76.

Crouch mentioned this inspiration – and The Messingkauf Dialogues specifically – in our conversation about The Author.

Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 64–65.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/mar/07/tim-crouch-the-author-la-tour [accessed 16 April 2011].

See Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 71. Ridout recognises that, when direct address arises ‘as a disruption to dominant conditions of spectatorship’, the embarrassments produced are ‘themselves a kind of pleasure’.

Ibid., p. 84.

Ibid., p. 85.

a smith: There was a person who came to see the show, early on in the run, who was known to us, who was affected quite personally by the issues in the play and that person came back and saw it later again and that person felt that they were better taken care of later in the run than they were at the beginning – and of course it's to do with the fact that they were seeing it again, but I had a conversation with that person afterwards and I felt that we had kind of learned or we had got better during the course of the performance at, the word that I used was ‘holding’ and it probably came somewhere from Adrian Howells. Holding the audience.

HELEN IBALL: And is it possible to distil what that ‘getting better’ involved?

as: Yes. We came up with lots of little practical things that we called ‘Rules and Tools’ which were very tiny devices that were exactly that – devices in which performers could look at members of the audience, just acknowledge them and let them know that it was alright. And it came out of, specifically, when audience members are interrupted during the show or questions are asked and then another cast member comes in. What we don't want to do is trash the audience and in one sense we could be completely trashing them by asking questions when we're not really looking for an answer and this was a big thing in the rehearsals.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Kleptoparasitism#p005lmgh [accessed 9 March 2011].

http://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/11/travelling-home.html [accessed 16 April 2011].

Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship, p. 24. The response that Grehan describes is to a moment in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, Act II ‘Auschwitz’ when she was ‘confronted with child performers who were, apparently, waiting to be exterminated’.

Ibid., p. 35. Earlier, Grehan has noted that ‘the performance (and or performers) can reach out to spectators and engage them bodily through touch and the generation of an intimate space: it is a relationship of proximity’ (p. 28) and she observes that, as Bauman points out, for Levinas ‘“proximity” stands for the unique quality of the ethical situation – which “forgets reciprocity, as in love that does not expect to be shared”’ and which is ‘not a very short distance’ but rather ‘purely (though not at all simply), a “suppression of distance”’ (p. 29). And, in her extension of Levinas, exploring the concept of ambivalence – ‘a productive space that allows for the ideas, traces, concepts and concerns in the performance to percolate’ and where the ‘spectators can become imaginatively involved with the works and the ethical questions they provoke’ (p. 22) – in order to meet the necessity to ‘extend Levinasian ethics into the ontological realm and the domain of practical responsibility’ (p. 25).

Claire Bishop quoted in Hal Foster, ‘Arty Party’, London Review of Books (4 December 2004), 21–22 (p. 22).

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 213.

Crouch, The Author, p. 21.

Ridout, Theatre and Ethics, p. 13.

Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 53.

With thanks to Steve Bottoms, Julia Collins, Tim Crouch, Bryony Drury, Tracy Hargreaves, Adrian Howells, Vic Llewellyn, Fran O'Donnell, a smith, Esther Smith. This project would not have been possible without their creativity, thoughtful input and generosity with their time. With thanks also to the British Academy for financial support, both for this research and towards the broader project Theatre Personal: Audiences with Intimacy.