THE Guardian's. These Nicholas de Jongh, has just had what he describes as 'one of the most unusual and experiences nearly professional theatre-going.
Since this experience took place in Pasadena, California, his review to go on. But the message comes across reasonably clearly.
The play he saw is called Felu And Her Friends. which is Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban-born American. Fefu's opening sets the pace for developments. She says: My husband married me as a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.
It's the staging Jongh. The play is being performed in a large house, and at the first act the audience is divided into four groups and told that each of them will be taken to scenes which take place in rooms or gardens of the house.
Each group sees the scenes in a different order.
"In each there revelation,' de Jongh writes.
The Other Bookshop 328, Upper Street, LONDON 057 FOR ALL YOUR SOCIALIST BOOKS critic, rewarding. theatrical life theatrical 10. years' Arts Lab we have only London, which badly miss.
written by out of the Arts succeeding adjacent several flights which gripped de and were pleasantly end of the incumbent, inomanin her sixties, watch four Tine old the tertible trouble she waś 'This with her not to say: "I'm very sorry. anything I can do?'.
thanked her, the stairs.
theatre since.
called Magique took tion a : The very strange and It gives a new sense of - interpreted not as a single action watched by an audience but as interconnecting experiences..
A similar thing happened to me 10 years ago. It occurred at what was the end.
Covent Garden, in devotees noW Or rather it occurred a couple of itself, doors down the road in Drury Lane, for when a dozen of us had paid 10 bob to see the The Mother we were led Lao ana Into an tenament stairsi passed of stairs, bicycles and cooking smells on the landings, and into a flat at the top.
We found ourselves in a bedroom reach told by heavily made-up 'Welcome to my As far as one could judge theatrical pictures decorating the room, it was her home.
And there, for about an hour, as we sat in some embarrassment on a sofa and armchairs, she told us about having At the end of The Mother, it was exceedingly difficult of Is there smiled pleasantly, and made our way down I've never felt quite the same way about sitting in an ordinary A few years ago a theatre group in La Grande Cirque over an empty warehowed in a suburb of the city and performed the 1789 French revoluaudience occupied the centre of the 'stage', bécoming the masses, while monarchists, Jacobins, COLLE back and forth, making their appeals. of a drama, which is normally 'out there', running its pre-written course beginning to. end, demands made on the audience save that we pay for our tickets, interrupt, and dutifully clap ai the Fragmenting that relationship, by switching scenes so that the audience is left to piece things together for For play circumstances where reality drama are not readily separable, or forcefully confronting an audience with choices that history actually presented, whithers the between our seat and the performers.
The demands that this makes beyond the escapism relatively comfortable associations that the bourgeois theatre usually has to offer Displacing the traditional relationship between performers and the audience potentially opens up brand new connections, and it is making connections — in economis, politics, the social sphere, ineverything - that is a principle strength of Marxism.
Iț is the inability, if not the refusal, bourgeois culture connections of much consequence 'that so often leaves it in the realm of 'entertainment; or merely when it attempts something more serious.
This is true not only of the theatr ut of just about every aspect o culture.
What makes the new Pompidou Centre in Paris so exciting to visit, for example, is that its large number of galleries and simultaneous suggest what exhibition centres, art galleries, and theatres in Britain rarely near to: Ine possibility making experiences and ideas come to no don't and protective make sterile and ideas come to life' events connections are for everyone to make, given half a chance.
of its daring, modernistic architecture, which houses a panoply of cultural negligible victory.
Average
made La whole, Pilger's film outside much documentaries.
questions British living room.
Inside out — the exterior of the Pompidou Centre in Paris: 'Making exper The excitemen: lies in the fact that productions -And the Pompidou Centre, with Also, the fact that Year Zero was shown on IT Y at peak viewing hours and must have been watched by millions of working people, is not a But, inevitably, Year Zero did not go far enough. Its reliance on appeals to humanity easily assimilable into the mainstream of bourgeois conscience-purging. And in the context of the week's TV viewing as it could not compete bombardment of counter images and messages of warmth and friendship towards China.
was too self-contained, cameo of 'a murdered society', looking on the like other television It failed to use the potentialities of film to reach out to its audience in new ways which might take more account of the reai politica context in which it would be seen, including the torpor induced by the TV screen in the average and devices file video, exhibitions, records, paintings sculpture, books, live performance and debate; frequently combined ou particular themes - - has managed no attract real live proletarians.
Socialist Challenge 15 Noversber 1979 Peer L
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