Falling Faint

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Notes

1 21 September 2009 at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, United Kingdom.

2 Helen Iball's ‘A Mouth to Feed Me: Reflection s Inspired by the Poster for Tim Crouch's The Author* discusses this tension further and offers an incisive analysis of how The Author is parasitic on Anthony Howells’ solo performance practice geared to producing ‘an accelerated friendship’ (Iball 2011: 435).

3 These are marked in the text by a full fifty three stage directions reading ‘Space’, two reading ‘More Space’, two reading ‘Silence’ and two reading ‘A beat’.

4 The tendency to pre-empt, or in my word ‘appropriate’, spectator response is most fascinatingly in evidence in a moment in Crouch's contribution to the 2011 special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review dedicated to The Author, where he notes: ‘I have never been in a play that has felt more endorsed by people walking out’ (Crouch 2011: 417).

5 The word ‘thoughtful’ recurs with some frequency in discussions of the making of The Author, set in contrast to both thoughtless characters and powerfully felt audience responses (see, for example, Crouch 2011: 422). Back in the play, ‘Tim’ also thinks himself thoughtful, his risks carefully calibrated and his work critically astute. I have no doubt about the real moral seriousness that underpinned The Author's making, although this article values the production for slightly different reasons to those articulated by its makers. Some of the weird fascination of The Author lies in how difficult it is to not see Crouch as risking failing to learn his own character's lesson, and repeating and doubling ‘Tim’'s self-assurance about his capacity to manage any intensity by an act of will and masterful, vigilant reason. The performance oscillates unstably between seeming to say to us ‘Beware. We audience and company are exactly like these people’ and ‘Of course we are nothing like them. We are more thoughtful, more in control.’

6 Penelope Woods' recent thesis ‘Globe audiences: Spectatorship and reconstruction at Shakespeare's Globe’ bears this out and also sets the standard (Woods 2012). A chapter focused on the production of Macbeth directed by Lucy Bailey at London's Shakespeare's Globe in 2010 considers the 360 audience members who fainted over the sixty-four performances of this production. Woods works with evidence derived from audience interviews and stage management reports (192-258). Among the many intriguing findings drawn out in this research are a number of instances where several individuals fall faint in close proximity to one another, or in quick succession (see 240). Woods notes that this raises the possibility that a dimension of affective transmission, suggestion or contagion is at play (242). The scenes described at the Globe recall Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect (2004). Brennan's key argument is that the feelings of one person can enter another person and alter his or her feelings. In line with her arguments already cited in this article, she suggests that earlier common knowledge of affective porousness was increasingly repressed in a Western culture that fetishized reason and continence, protecting a fragile, privatized ideal of free-will and intentionality (12).