'This is no doubt a good thing, no
doubt its intentions are also good. And it looks and it sounds elegant, pure,
pristine. And I hate it. I'm begrudging its inanities, I'm offended by its
worthiness. That's not to say it's smug, but I just feel so irked and selfish
in comparison.'
Matt Trueman (extract from conversation,
continued below)
In April 2011, when Rajni Shah
Projects premiered Glorious at the
SPILL Festival, theatre critic Matt Trueman saw the show and had what he called
an “allergic reaction” to it. He felt deeply conflicted about whether to write
about the show or not, and finally decided that he couldn’t.
This was intriguing to me, and
since he wasn’t the only one who felt negatively about the work, I decided to
get in touch with him to see if he might be interested in a dialogue. This
initial contact led to an extended period of intermittent emails and meetings,
and finally I invited Matt to come and see Glorious
again in Lancaster, on its final outing at the Nuffield Theatre (Live at
LICA), December 1st 2012.
We were both very clear that this
invitation to see the show again was made with no strings attached. We were
both curious to see where it might lead – and it felt, to me at least, like an
exciting opportunity for real dialogue between someone who makes work
professionally and someone who watches work professionally.
What follows is a very edited
version of a long conversation we had a few weeks after he had watched the show
for the second time. What I particularly like about this conversation is that
it sits awkwardly within discussions of the role of the critic and ideas about
the ‘embedded critic’. Matt attended the work the second time neither as a
critic (he was not coming to review the work) nor as a friend of
the project, but as someone who had a relationship to it as an audience member,
and who was open to seeing whether that relationship might change over time.
I’m guessing that the content of
the conversation will be of interest mostly to people who have seen Glorious. It is quite wandering. But my
desire to post it here, even after so much time has passed, comes from the fact
that I’m glad it exists. I like that it happened. I think it’s wonderful. And
the way that this has played out taught me a lot. About what dialogue might
really mean, about stepping out of comfort zones, about listening to discomfort
instead of fleeing, and about changing old structures (like the ones
surrounding makers/critics) by simply acting differently.
Here it is:
[…]
RS: After we'd done London - and we had quite a break before we did
[the next version of Glorious in] Newcastle
- we all felt like we actually knew the show and we could really throw it open
in a way that we'd always wanted to. Whereas with [the preview in] Nottingham
and even with London - because we hadn't done it yet ourselves, we didn't know
the material - so even though we were working with people and they were very
much a part of it, I think after London we were much more able to say, okay, we
could do anything with this.
MT: That's really interesting because so much of its coding - for
want of a better word -
RS: I love the word coding!
MT: - has got reinvention built into it, and so until you've got
something to reinvent from, it's somehow incomplete I guess. And the play of
differences - in a way, seeing it twice in two different settings – is a very
important way to experience it from the outside, because it is so fleet of foot
and so malleable. But also, it seems to me that it is based on a core framework
that can be kind of like a Christmas tree that can be decorated and the end
result is radically different whichever way you do it, but at some level the
tree needs to be secure to hold everything that's around it and to have bits taken
and changed and turned inside out. And without that being secure - with that
being as up for grabs as anything around it - it kind of becomes a tricky thing
to pin down maybe. You kind of need to see what's come from and what's within.
RS: The other thing that I'm very aware of is that until we'd done
those two first shows my main focus and my main concern was getting it right
for the participants. Even though I wanted to make a show that had completely
integrity artistically for us, but that also could be completely open to those
people and that they could own. And that was kind of an impossible challenge -
how do you do both of those things, and not just go ' well it's about being a
community show and that's really all it's about.' Or, 'it's our show and we're
asking people to do something very particular that isn't about them.' But how
do you allow, or try and allow, those two things to meet onstage?
But I did realise after the London
show that I had - it wasn't of course that I'd never considered the audience
(laughs) - but I just wasn't worried about the audience in the same way. But
then I realised that that was a massive thing because their time with the show
is really short and everybody else gets at least a week to be within it and
have that experience. And actually we needed to find a way - wherever the
audience was coming from - to at least allow the possibility that they could
find a way into it if they wanted to.
MT: It's funny that you mention the shortness of it actually.
Because that took me by surprise second time around. And thinking about it now,
I can only imagine that it comes from the repetition, and having been so fed up
the first time round that I genuinely found it quite excruciating (RS laughs).
So then to come and be like 'oh, first act’s over! Is that all the cycle is? In
my mind it's much longer.' And I might be wrong but I think it was probably - I
half remember this sense of the realisation that it was then going to repeat -
RS: Specially if you hated it! (laughter)
MT: - well probably wrapped up in that reaction was the sense of -
okay, and then a second time - so each time I kind of - and maybe it works both
for and against it depending on which side of the fork the ball happens to go
down. And either way you're either digging deeper or going higher with it. And
if you're having a good trip, you go okay brilliant let's listen to this again,
another chance to pick up on different bits. And I was surprised by how
different bits vibrated in different ways, different lines in things that
people wrote, particularly with the music changing behind it. But yeah, if
you're on a good trip, going again and again is a great thing. But if you're on
a bad trip, it just gets more and more – and you get het up with the fact that…
I felt very trapped by it the first time around.
RS: Yes. It's interesting because I had a long talk with Gerry Harris who's an academic in Lancaster, who I just met for the first time this
trip, and I met with her early on in the visit. And she'd read the mix of reviews
and was really fascinated and said that she was really interested to see how Glorious would work because it's clearly
a project that's about being very open and generous to people, but that my work
is really stark and asks a lot of audiences - she'd only seen previous work -
and she was interested to see how those two things would meet.
And I think Glorious is no different because almost more than anything else it
does say 'you can choose to dive into this, and if you don't...’. I think if
you're not in it … there is no other way in. You can't just watch it and think,
it's just a piece of theatre, it's not great, I'll just look at the lights
because -
MT: It's so bare…. I found myself using the word 'austere', firstly
about the Barbican as a building, and the way that that felt like it carried on
into the show somehow. Which is probably where this [incorrect] memory of
Guildhall musicians dressed in black comes from. This very serious 'show with a
message'. And although that message was heart, it felt like 'heart' typed out
on a white sheet of paper. Whereas this time around it really felt like heart.
[…]
MT: I wanted to also find out a bit more about the process of
working with the six people who deliver writing - what the timescale was with
them, what they were like, what their reactions to doing it were.
RS: I'll talk specifically about Lancaster because it is different
every time, but there's basically this really set thing that happens at the
beginning of the process and this really set thing that happens at the end
which is the show, and in between is this grey area where we just find our way
through whatever happens and [with] whoever we've met.
So we begin by doing this kind of
stall, and this time we had it in Morecambe and Lancaster libraries and then in
a shopping centre in Lancaster over a week, where we invite people to write a
letter to a stranger. And that happens in public space, but we have flowers -
the same type of flowers we'll use in the show - that we give out to passers-by
to tell them that we're there. And then anybody can stop, write a letter or a
postcard, put it in an envelope, leave it, and take one that someone else has
written. So it's an exchange between strangers. And we meet several hundred
people that way. And we have tea and it's all very 'us', it gives people a
really good sense of who we are. And we invite anybody to leave their contact
details and we also say that we'll be doing workshops if anybody is interested.
And usually you can tell - because if people are interested they linger and you
chat with them and tell them a bit about what you're doing and then for some of
them that really sparks something.
It's interesting because I think
when we started this project I had a sense that we were going to work with
people who've never done anything like this before - but of course there's no
way of actually doing that without having a weird segregation process where you
meet people and talk to them and then decide which ones are suitable!
MT: Or you force your way into something that already exists.
RS: Yes. And the whole concept of the piece is so much that whoever
it’s right for will find it. So anybody who's interested can come. And then we
hold our first workshop and we follow up - and with this group, in the very
first workshop, Bella and Brian were there. And then Amy and Stephen […]
MT: How many hours would you say you spent with them in workshops?
RS: Maybe ten. Most of them came to a few workshops and rehearsals.
Yeah. It probably varied a bit.
MT: Because in a funny sort of way I think the first time around I
was looking to them for the content of the show - perhaps because the lyrics
are so - concept-heavy is the wrong word - but they contain really meaty
phrases that are very delicately put. And the music doesn't swallow them but
they ride it. They spin away from you quite quickly before you can start
unpicking what it means.
So you turn to these not simple but
straightforward in their delivery [monologues], asking what's in these? And
because of the way that language exists on stage I tended to look to what they were saying rather than that they were saying the first time
around. And it was very interesting to see it again after seeing Nine [by Chris Goode] actually and the
way that over however long Chris and Kirsty and Jamie had had with those people
they'd managed to facilitate that into a mode of self-expression that used its
tools to the max.
RS: They put out a call, didn't they?
MT: Yes. And it was interesting to think of Glorious as a springboard for Nine
and Nine as a going further than,
somehow quite consciously, knowing that Chris had responded to Glorious and I suppose that then became
a bit of a question mark to me. In that [Glorious]
gives people a chance to say something but what they say is still quite naked
and exposing … [it] hasn't been made to be contoured in the way that you can
imagine every piece in Nine being
delivered in that form but then having been stretched and tweaked. So the
thought process I went on afterwards with that was this slightly strange
balance of how they are fitting in with you, where the musicians are doing the
opposite and making the core - that Christmas tree thing we talked about -
they're somehow interrupting and twisting and shaping the central thing whereas
the six bits of [monologue] material are kind of like baubles, they sit on the
edges of it. They don't interrupt the actual state of that coding I guess - the
initial terms.
So somewhere in the structure I
wonder whether they are doing you a favour by filling in a space that is left
blank for something. And maybe that's where the process and the effects of
those ten hours comes into play - but sitting and watching it as an outsider to
that, there's something slightly funny about that relationship there. You know
it's not in any way exploitative because you can tell that's not the spirit of
the entire project. But it doesn't necessarily express the openness of the rest
of it somehow.
RS: I think there is something about value there though, in terms
of what people are speaking about […]. There’s something very conscious about
the types of things people are talking about in the monologues. And I'm really
aware that [audiences] come sometimes with this expectation of what 'glorious'
might be, and what we might value under that term. But I think the content of
those monologues feels really important - and for me they do provide a kind of
narrative actually, in that it's very much about re-listening and how we listen
to each other, but also how we might listen to people who we don't know, whose
lives we don't know anything about, and which we might [otherwise] never find
out anything about.
MT: And you get a tiny fragment, a shard.
RS: And you kind of get to know someone, actually, through that.
Whereas, I think, if they were going through a different process - which, I
think, in Chris' show firstly because people are responding to a call-out and
going through an audition process of some kind, and secondly because his work
is very different from mine - they are crafting something in a very different
way. And I would say that the ask of the participants in Glorious is very different […] but it's designed so that anybody
can take part, so that if someone really wanted to do it and they could only
come to one rehearsal we could find a way to make that work. And although the
musicians go through a whole process with us, we're meeting them in a different
way. They've already identified as musicians. Whereas the people reading
monologues have only ever identified as passers-by at the moment we meet them.
MT: That's interesting.
RS: And then there's something there. For some reason they're
willing to take a risk - but it's a very different ask and it does sit very
differently within the piece.
MT: Maybe this is a hangover from Nine, me assuming something that isn't there, but part of me sees the
gesture that you make to them kind of as the gift of us. And maybe this is the
wrong way round, in terms of projector-receiver but -
RS: The gift of us as in the audience?
MT: Yes. So by saying kind of the gesture of Glorious in those bits is saying, 'you can say something and it
will be heard.'
RS: But also, ‘you can hear something that is being said’. And I
think it's really important that it's both of those things.
MT: To the participants?
RS: To the audience.
[…]
RS: I remember somebody saying to me: 'I don't remember that much
about the content of what people were saying [in the monologues] and therefore
it wasn't the right thing' or 'it wasn't enough that it stuck with me'. And I
kind of think it's okay that the words fall away because the words are a
vehicle for people to be present with an audience and then to say goodbye to an
audience. And that's not to say that they're not important, because I think
they give you a way into somebody's voice and body and language and way of
being. But they're not operating in the way that words normally operate in,
say, a play or a more normal theatrical setting. And that's an odd thing to
read.
MT: That's very interesting. I certainly got a sense of the
different rhythms and different treads and things like that, but I found myself
watching the musicians for that more - almost getting more of a sense of
character, and being more intrigued by these people that were around the back
of the stage […].
RS: I think that's alright though.
MT: Oh yeah yeah yeah. I'm with you. I'm trying to figure out-
RS: The things at the edges are often, I find, more interesting.
When I'm watching a piece of theatre, if a technician's doing something over
here then that's always more fascinating than somebody centre-stage. Which is
also what I think is interesting about this question of me being on stage. It's
been such a 'thing' of, like, ‘Is she really egotistical?’ Or, how could I
choose to put myself on a podium in the centre of the stage in a piece that has
this whole thing about generosity? It's really interesting, and it's something
I've come back to so many times. And we talked about it from the beginning - is
this the right decision? Because in a way it's such an odd thing to do. But I
also think you need that in order for the edges to appear.
MT: Mmmmm. Yeah, that's interesting.
RS: And the edges are there, I completely acknowledge, in every
show I've made, the edges are the things that are interesting. But you need
something in the centre in order to make that possible.
[…]
RS: And so what I kind of wanted to ask you was whether you think
you have changed in the time between seeing the two shows […].
MT: Yeah. I have changed. But I couldn’t tell you how in 18 months.
I could tell you some things about it. The mode of watching being very
different from coming to SPILL and this wrapped into the situation of it and my
approach physically and psychologically. Turning up to SPILL, as a festival
which means you know you're going to be working hard, you're going to be
baffled, you're going to turn up and in the show you're going to be clutching
at those threads to try and make sense. Which is kind of perverse for Live Art as
well because so much of it is just about sitting alongside. Whereas, say, new
writing or a play is very much about it sitting up here (points to head) and
processing it in your head.
RS: But SPILL also does a very particular thing with its marketing
as well, I think, which is all about taking risks and going to this extreme
place, which is quite interesting as well in terms of a show like Glorious, which sort of is doing those
things but in a very different way.
MT: You're right. So yeah, you go and you're like, ‘Right, come on
then, somehow I'm going to meet you head on as a piece of work’. Whether that's
because I know the ideas are going to be pretty challenging and slippery or I
know you're going to throw something at me that I might not be able to handle
so I'm braced against you. And then compare that to this thing of having been a
guest, and having had a nice train journey up [to Lancaster], a bracing walk,
and a last little dash, and then getting into the warm and sitting down, and
your chat beforehand*. And feeling like there was a very familiar pre-show mode
of mingling, that took me back to shows in Summer theatre camp or something
like that. Not school where it was all about achievement or the CV but
something more relaxed, and sharing actually - that's a key word.
[…]
Also, not trying so hard as an
audience member. Not trying to get the better of shows. Actually I've never said
that before! Two years ago – [as a critic] you're trying to make your name,
you're trying to find the thing that undercuts the whole, that no-one else has
spotted, that gets the whole to fit into place. You're always on the lookout
for the answer that no-one else is going to get. And that's too exhausting to
do all the time, so now I’ve just become content, kind of, to be more on the
actual truth of a show, rather than spinning it...
RS: And how much do you feel like you, when you're watching
something with a view to writing about it, I guess, how much do you feel that
you can just watch it, as you? And have a response to it that's very much your
response, that maybe you then frame in a wider context? And how much do you
feel a responsibility to do something other?
MT: There's two sides to that, I guess. One is that - it should be
the second one because it's almost the 'but' - but I always worry that I
haven't - I guess the same things come out of a piece of work again and again,
so I always tune into the philosophy of a show, by which I mean ideas of
determinism and free will, things like that […] I see the same things, also in
the politics of work, […] anti-consumerist ideas at quite a simple level, or
the sense of the corrupt - and I worry that because it chimes with something up
here (points to head) that's quite personal for me I block off things that
they're trying to say that are more nuanced, or slightly different - so I'm not
doing someone's work justice because it falls into one of the buckets in my
head of set ideas!
RS: What was the other thing?
MT: It's very hard to just watch. At some level you know whether
you've enjoyed it or not, because you feel enjoyment. People always moan about
star ratings. For me, you can feel a star rating. It's like you're a
thermometer, or a test-your-strength, and it just rises to a certain point. And
yes in that sense, you can't turn that off. But it's very hard to just let that
be everything. You're constantly trying to read things, in the sense of join
the dots and pick the threads and -
RS: It's really interesting hearing you talk about that, about
trying to figure out where a thing is going. Because I think that Glorious is a very frustrating show if
that's what you're trying to do. It kind of really works against that.
MT: Yeah. Yes! That’s interesting.
RS: And that would be incredibly frustrating.
MT: Yeah. That's very interesting.
RS: Did you know anything about my previous work when you came to
see Glorious?
MT: I think I had seen you in the SPILL brochure the time before,
for the piece about America, and I had read the blurb of that, and for some
reason - probably because I was a bit younger and a bit more […].
But actually to bring it back to
the question before, as it were, the other worry then is that you like things
that you agree with and you get that from it, but also that the person who's
writing about the show is - from a journalistic perspective - always trying to
concretise and make sense of. And that is why particularly I think in the
traditional new writing world everything has become quite simple and
straightforward, and it says something very obviously. Because that is the work
that gets four stars, because critics can codify it and work it out and go:
Here is the thing in a nice new paragraph.
But actually, the work that's much
more exciting is work that goes 'oh my god that's scrambled my head' - that
quality of, you know, I don't know what to make of that. How exciting, how
interesting, that has set me challenges that I now have to go away and think
about. And when you're seeing a show every day, you just don't have time to do
that.
But in answer to your question, not
that much in terms of the work. I knew a tiny little shard about it, but that's
it.
RS: Because that's another thing I'm very aware of, that Glorious is the third in a loose
trilogy. That's not an essential part of its identity, but there is something
interesting about that in terms of its shape and where it's come from, I think,
because of what those pieces were doing aesthetically and in terms of cultural
identity. And this piece goes into a very different space. But also, there are
some elements of it that are related to those other pieces, and as we're
talking it occurs to me as well that there's something-
MT: Helena [Suarez] also mentioned that you're taking a break.
RS: Yeah, I'm done!
MT: Done done? For good?
RS: Yeah. I think so. I mean, you never know what will happen but -
I wrote about this recently actually. After [the Glorious performance at] the Barbican, there were some beautiful
amazing pieces of writing that came out of that which I really appreciated. And
what I love about a lot of those is that they really acknowledged - like Maddy[Costa]'s piece really acknowledges that she found the first act really hard,
which I like, because I think that's part of it. But anyway, the negative
reviews just threw me right off course. I really struggled with them.
But I think what I realised is that
that's not about those reviews - because actually some of those reviews I can
just throw in the bin, others raised some points that have been really
interesting to grapple with and make changes in response to. But I need to stop
doing this. I'm at the end of something, and if I carried on I think I'd become
bitter and old, and that's not okay. […] but also, this is not a kind of
climate in which I can make the kind of work that I've been making, full stop.
And I think if I were to continue I'd have to make compromises in ways that I'm
just not prepared to. And other people are, and that's great, and also other
people make different types of work that can sit in a different kind of way,
but I just feel like I can't right now.
It's really interesting, the last
two shows we've done, in Mons and this one, I've loved them in many ways, but
when I stood up in Mons and we were about the begin the show, I thought: yeah,
I need to stop doing this. I don't love it. I don't need it, and I don't feel
like it needs me.
MT: That's really interesting. Because I would have thought the
continent would have been much easier to -
RS: It wasn't to do with that show though. The show was amazing,
and it worked so well, the whole project worked really well in Mons. But it was about me recognising how I
felt being on stage. Yeah, it's been quite hard because theatre has been what
I've loved my whole life. But I also think it's okay. I think it's really good
to recognise that now, rather than when it's too late.
[Someone walks into the room, our
time is up, we say goodbye and thank you]
*As part of the Lancaster version
of Glorious, Rajni introduced the
cast to the audience and welcomed everyone in the foyer before the show began.
This was not yet a part of Glorious when it was performed in London.
