UWE’s Small Moving Parts are running a season at the Alma all about the business of acting. Steve Wright lurks in the shadows.

It is the blackest travesty of theatre ever written – the actor as the crucified one, crucified by his creator and his fellow human beings, the audience. Enjoy your guilt – laugh hard! It demands that hard, dry scoffing that Beckett referred to as dianoetic laughter. Actors love it! Give them all you can! They deserve it!” Not, as you might imagine, an invitation to some mass ritual thespian sacrifice, but an account of a powerful one-act drama by Samuel Beckett that puts that most enigmatic of professions under the scalpel.

Beckett’s ‘Catastrophe’ is one of a quartet of one-act plays all about – well, all about acting: and all being presented by UWE’s Small Moving Parts student company, under the aegis of their stalwart director John Reid. SMP will present the plays in rep: and a fine clutch they are too, coming from the pens of messrs Chekhov, Beckett, Allen (Woody, not Keith) and Reid himself.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, Beckett’s ‘Catastrophe’ – a savage travesty of ‘director’s theatre’ where the actor is reduced to a mute, suffering puppet – will be performed with Reid’s ‘Pots’, an absurdist comedy about the first ‘method actor’, Polus. Tuesday and Thursday, meanwhile, bring run-outs for ‘Swan Song’ (pictured), Chekhov’s tragicomic portrait of the schizoid existence of the ordinary actor – lost without his profession, yet lost, precisely, in that profession – and Woody Allen’s ‘God (A Play)’.

From the top, then… Written late in Beckett’s career (1982), ‘Catastrophe’ contains, Reid explains, “a dark hint about the kind of spectacle audiences like to consume – a spectacle of suffering and disaster… We appear to be in some kind of minimalist laboratory of theatre art where the all-powerful director (and Creator) controls, manipulates and dissects the slightest twitch of the actor, the Protagonist. The actor is the puppet; the director the fascist tyrant. The audience are a conspiracy of sadists. Welcome to the slave morality of art.” Only in the play’s final seconds does the Protagonist finally return the gaze of his persecutors – a moment of defiance, promises Reid, that makes the audience falter in its applause.

Reid’s own ‘Pots’, meanwhile, draws on the scant details known about the fourth-century BC actor Polus, renowned for his acting of tragic heroines. The story goes that Polus used the ashes of his dead son to bring real feelings of grief to the ritual of mourning enacted by the Greek princess Electra in Sophocles’s eponymous play, grieving for her brother Orestes whom she believes dead. “Polus’s story has remained one of the most famous anecdotes about the process and mechanics of acting: it has surfaced repeatedly in debates about the nature of acting and the training of actors,” Reid explains. “Polus became an iconic image of the actor as a liminal figure – caught between both being and not-being, between being himself and being his character. Since his way of working upon himself and his ‘real’ feelings anticipates some of the practices in modern actor training, Polus seemed a promising starting-point for a comedy about acting.”

Chekhov’s very first play ‘Swan Song’ dates from a time when centuries of state censorship had left Russian theatre in a state of stagnation and degeneration. Svetlovidov, an old comic actor, is seated in a rundown provincial theatre after his last performance – and is coming to the tragic realisation that he has devoted 45 years of his life to performing in trivial plays. The ‘sacred art’ of acting has been a miserable sham. “The play could be performed as a tear-jerker but it is, really, a tragic comedy,” Reid opines. “The desolation of this second-rate, empty, provincial theatre – its auditorium is like a grave – suggests a theatrical terrain not unlike Beckett’s. The presence of the audience is so insistently denied that eventually we are made to feel culpable and complicit with the rule of the mediocre – the audience is put in the dock.”

Allen’s ‘God: A Play’ is, says Reid, a “facetious travesty of that angst-ridden, modernist theatre, most closely associated with the Beckett of ‘Waiting for Godot’… Allen’s comic instincts are to mock the high seriousness of high art – while, at the same time, and paradoxically, understanding them so well that he can turn to Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ and create one of the tenderest, most thoughtful films of the twentieth century [‘Hannah and Her Sisters’]”. In ‘God’, meanwhile, Allen condenses the history of American theatre and film into, says Reid, “an absurdist pantomime worthy of a latter-day Aristophanes. Beckett used Laurel and Hardy types to travesty the intellectual pretensions of Christian theological culture; Woody puts the iconic, thespian types of American culture through a similar mincer.”

“The plays all offer marvellously different perspectives upon the ‘sacred art’ of acting,” Reid concludes. “The programme is designed to provoke and celebrate.”

THESE SHADOWS IS AT THE ALMA TAVERN, BRISTOL UNTIL SAT 5 FEB.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2011 

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