Date: 6th June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season

Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? Dirty Work tells a tale of heroes and villains, of brave protagonists and innocent victims. Its backdrop is the great events of the twentieth century and the misunderstandings of a suburban kitchen. It includes mass suicides and accidental murders, characters from Shakespeare and plot twists from Eastenders. Its mood is funny, predictable, surprising and grave; it takes place in houses, cities, across the sky, and throughout the universe. And all this, in Toynbee Hall’s 250 seat theatre.

Dirty Work manages to be all these things because it doesn’t have to depict them on stage. In fact, the set is bare, and the ‘play’ is conjured up by two actors sitting near the footlights, describing each event through stage directions. Freed from the physical restraints of representation, they paint a vast landscape of possibility – from planes writing in the sky to gifts the size of an atom. The result is a montage of potential, a triumph of imagination over representation.

It’s not just the actors who let their imaginations run wild, of course. Here, as in all other types of performance, it’s the audience members who construct the drama, and the actors who supply the cutting pattern. The ‘play’ – all five acts of it – does not take place on stage, but somewhere between them, the actors who describe, and us, the audience that imagines. When, early on, the actors describe the reaction of an hysterical audience, it’s clearly not us – the audience in the here and now. Instead, in a moment of vivid dramatic collusion, we must generate a secondary audience together. Forced to replicate ourselves from the outside, the present audience is swung out of the auditorium and into the director’s chair - the effect is almost physical.

But unlike a conventional play – with a set, dialogue and characters – the pattern here is sketchy. It’s outlined in clichés so that, like a cold-reading from a psychic, its suggestions can be absorbed easily. Hollywood blockbusters roll into urban myths, which stand alongside soap opera dramatics, which tumble into popular sci-fi. And, because the action is outlined and not displayed, the experience of watching is turned from one of collective imagining or recognition, into one of individualised creation. Audience members don’t react to a moment together – laughing at a slapstick routine, for example – but snatch the suggestion of that moment away, and work on it themselves. One viewer laughed so loudly at unlikely moments I thought she had been planted there to drive home this very point.

And yet there is an undulating rhythm to Dirty Work that draws the audience inexorably and collectively along. Rolling gently from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to an accident with a toaster, the narrative is both familiar and surprising enough to herd us all together. In other words, while the points of reference themselves – Hollywood, Eastenders, popular Shakespeare - feel like performative clichés, the ways they are sewn together are much more surprising. And, in fact, even these clichés represent a kind of shared experience. They might be easy to recognise, but the scenarios Dirty Work invokes are highly specific. It’s a testament to the prevalence of a particular kind of populist sci-fi, for example, that a robot-dog-superhero can slip smoothly into the narrative.

By citing so many performance genres, Dirty Work sets itself up as their child – if not their heir. Like any rebellious child, it uses its parents’ language to attack their authority – splicing between different types of performance to explode the autonomy they each pretend. But also like a rebellious child, its limits are set by its parents’ horizons. Dirty Work can only draw on the banks of meaning that other performances have left behind. The life of the play exists somewhere between these two conflicts: between the possibility of knowledge, and the limits of imagination; between the navigation of the actors, and the ownership of the audience. Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? No, but in its mixture of guidance and cultural norms, it feels like a very enjoyable collaboration.

Written by Mary Paterson

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http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/?event=136&date=2007-06#136