Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch's Sight Specifics in ENGLAND and The Author

Abstract

This essay considers Tim Crouch's two most recent plays, ENGLAND and The Author, in relation to the performance spaces for which they were commissioned – respectively, a white-walled art gallery (the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh) and a black box studio theatre (the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, London). It examines the ways in which Crouch explores and subverts the ideological particularities of the gallery and theatre space, particularly with respect to conventions around spectatorial response. Building on a distinction drawn by art critic Brian O'Doherty, the essay proposes that the disembodied ‘Eye’ conventionally assumed by both gallery and end-on theatre auditorium is displaced by these plays in favour of an awkwardly materialized Spectator, both emancipated from the collective and implicated in the proceedings.

Notes

Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 39, 41–42.

Ibid., p. 15.

Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Gregory Battcock (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 116–47 (p. 140).

Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 15.

Russell West. ‘Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque’, The Seventeenth Century, 18 (2003), 25–43 (pp. 26, 28).

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972), p. 16.

Ibid., p. 9.

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

See Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).

Fiona Wilkie, ‘Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-specific Performance in Britain’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18 (2002), 140–60 (p. 150).

Tim Crouch, ENGLAND (London: Oberon, 2007), p. 14. Subsequent page references from this play will be parenthesised in the text.

Tim Crouch, The Author (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 16. Subsequent page references from this play will be parenthesised in the text.

Mark Ravenhill, ‘Foreword’ to Dan Rebellato's Theatre & Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp.ix–xiv (p. xiii).

Tim Crouch, unpublished interview with Stephen Bottoms. Leeds, 6 November 2008. Subsequent quotes from Crouch are taken from this interview unless otherwise noted.

Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 21.

Ibid., p. 24.

Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 1. Quoted in translation (apparently his own) by Douglas Crimp, in On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 202–03.

Tim Crouch, unpublished interview with Stephen Bottoms. Subsequent unattributed quotes from Crouch are all from this source.

The plays' characters are all named after the actors playing them. Adrian Howells originated the role of the audience member in the Royal Court production, but on tour it was played by Chris Goode. I shall refer hereafter to Adrian, simply because that is the name which appears in the published text.

I will use the first name Tim to designate the character of Tim Crouch as written in The Author, and the surname Crouch to designate the author of The Author (though the distinction is sometimes necessarily blurry).

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 7.

Ibid., pp. 4–5.

Ibid., p. 15.

Ibid., pp. 17, 13.

Presumably for copyright reasons, these lyrics do not appear in the play's published text. A stage direction simply notes that ‘she sings some of a song from a West End musical’ (p.28). The words here are quoted from http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/highschoolmusical/wereallinthistogether.htm [accessed 27 June 2011].

Report and video online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8292680.stm [accessed 27 June 2011].

See, for example, some of the responses discussed in Tim Crouch's own contribution to this Forum, ‘Response and Responsibility’, pp. 416–22 and various speakers' comments in the subsequent ‘A Conversation about Dialogue', pp. 423–30.

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 3rd edition (London: Pluto, 2000).

Tim Etchells, ‘A six-thousand-and-forty-seven-word manifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes’, in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Live: Art and Performance (London: Routledge/Tate, 2004) pp. 210–17 (p. 215).

Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, p. 204.

O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, p. 38.

See, for instance, Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 189–90.

Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 99, 100.

Ibid., p. 99.

Sierz, quoting Michael Billington's Guardian review, in In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 95.

John Peter's Sunday Times review. Cited by Sierz, p. 96.

Dan Rebellato. ‘Introduction’ to Mark Ravenhill's Plays: One (London: Methuen, 2001), p. x.

MacDonald cited in Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 97.

See, for instance, Peggy Phelan's Foreword to Tim Etchells's Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 9–10, as well as Etchells's own commentary on the topic on pp. 17–18, 58–59. Also Karen Christopher's ‘Beginnings’, in Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, ed. by Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 51.