Chapter
4
‘and
they’re always looking to the audience’
‘Unlike theatre characters,
the contact the clown has with his public is immediate; he comes to life by
playing with the people who are looking at him. It is not possible to be a
clown for an audience; you play with your audience.’[1]
The
premise of having clowns stage a play is one in which we can never lose sight
of the construct, the artifice of theatre. The clowns cannot resist looking at
the audience, playing up to them and vying for their attention and, therefore,
any characterisation we see is clearly the choice of the clown (see
fig.7). In this sense, we can say that clowning is an extremely Brechtian form
of acting[2],
following completely Brecht’s insistence that, when acting, you must ‘Show that
you are showing! Among all the varied attitudes which you show when showing how
men play their parts, the attitude of showing must never be forgotten’[3].
Brecht himself was greatly influenced by the clown Karl Valentin, and saw the
clowns’ history and potential future as politically powerful creatures. In
Brecht’s vision of epic theatre, they could ‘acknowledge the insufficiency of
their roles and those of others by breaking the illusionistic frame of a scene’
and therefore, ‘acknowledge the insufficiency of the theatrical framework and
the social system in which they play their roles. The illusions they dispel are
political as well as aesthetic’[4].
fig.7 (Alfredo
the Detective)
Brecht’s
clowns were placed in highly political contexts, as part of a social hierarchy
and with a need, if not to climb the ladder, at the very least to survive at
the bottom of the pile. The clown is traditionally an outsider, someone who
does not belong in the society he moves in. Through his eyes, the familiar rituals
of our society are made strange and his vain attempts either to conform or to
survive, despite his inability to conform, reveal to us truths that only a
clown, only an idiot, can expose. In Spymonkey, however, there is no societal
framework for them to move around in. The framework for the clowns is the play
Forbes has written. Therefore, the illusions Spymonkey dispel are more
aesthetic than political. A difference of emphasis is that Spymonkey’s breaking
of the fourth wall is not so much an acknowledgement of theatre’s
insufficiency, as Joel Shuchter suggests Brecht’s was, but a celebration of the
artifice of theatre.
‘The art of theatre is to be
able to communicate with the audience. Often people say: I think that’s a
wonderfully restrained performance ... I’ve been along to see those
performances and there’s nothing happening. There’s no connection between these
people and what’s going on onstage, with the audience - there’s no generosity,
there’s no language. It’s the language of television and film, which is
wonderful in its own place but not in the theatre. The theatre’s the most
wonderful artifice, it is fantastically artificial and that’s what it’s about.
It’s a celebration of that artifice.’[5]
Whilst
Brecht sought to expose the artifice of theatre for explicitly political
reasons, seeking to find a form to serve his content[6]
- a form which empowered and reflected the possibility to change, Cal
McCrystal’s aim is a theatrical honesty.
‘Do you remember the game of hide and seek we played when I
was small and used to hide under the blanket? You would come into the room and
say: "Where is my child? I can't find him". And you would let your
voice hang in the air because you liked to hear me giggling under the blanket
...You know Daddy, that on the stage, we have to speak with the same élan as
when we played hide and seek underneath the blanket; the same you put in the
words when you wanted me to understand you were playing a game. This moment of
letting the voice hang in the air so as to listen to the laughs is really
important. It's this that allows the spectator to enter into the story. And you
know, the blanket I hide under plays exactly the same role as the fourth wall.
The fourth wall? Don't you know about the fourth wall Daddy? Actors imagined that
between them and the audience was a great wall - a wall that authorised them to
pretend that nobody was listening to them, nobody was looking at them.’[7]
The
difference between Cal’s clowns acting in a play and actors behind the fourth
wall, is that the audience are invited to join in a game. The clowns don’t
ignore them or simply expect them to believe in what they show them as if it is
real; instead they look at them and invite them to enjoy a wilful game of
pretend.
‘The actors come out and
say, 'We're doing a show', and they're always looking to the audience. It's
like the child in a school play looking out for their mother. It's something I
do for the audience and the actors, because it's much harder to turn
performances inwards to other actors if they've already established a
connection with the audience.’[8]
The
second result of this direct connection with the audience is that, when the
actors have introduced themselves as actors (not characters) and introduced the
show as a show (not reality), we understand that we are about to watch a live
performance and that, because it is live, anything can happen. And, of course,
it does. In most theatre the uniqueness of one performance to the next is, in
fact, marginal. The scenes are the same, the lines are the same, the story is
the same; yet the possibility for change from one night to the next is huge.
Actors can forget lines and the cast will have to adlib to ‘save’ the
situation, a piece of scenery could fall down, lighting cues, sound cues,
technical props can all go wrong and so on. When this kind of thing happens to
a play, which is not already formally prepared to reveal itself as an artifice,
the brittle deceit of illusionism is completely shattered.
‘Accidents of this sort are
useful not only for reviving worn-out schemes, but even more for destroying
another pernicious scheme – the one that reduces the role of the spectator to
the role of voyeur’.[9]
In
fact, if a production had already involved any kind of direct address or
acknowledgement of its constructed nature, all an actor need do when an
‘accident’ occurs is acknowledge it and the audience are likely to remember
this moment of the evening above all. It is surprising that, though the fourth
wall is only a comparatively recent invention in terms of theatre history, its
philosophy has become so thoroughly embedded in acting tradition that one can
watch a performance, even of a Brecht play, in which a mistake of this kind
occurs and yet the actors reaction is to be ‘professional’, ignore it and soldier
on!
Cal
McCrystal understands that when the ‘accident’ occurs, it is a thrill to the
audience, reminding them that they are witnessing something live, unique and
unpredictable. And so Spymonkey’s shows bring to the forefront the aspects of a
performance that can change radically within a scripted play. This leads to a
methodological language in Spymonkey rehearsal which refers to the Cooped
(or Stiff) storyline and the Spymonkey storyline[10].
The two are working simultaneously throughout a show, though the Spymonkey
storyline is constantly upstaging the storyline of the play.
PLAY CLIP 7
The play Forbes
has written is supposed to progress from the letter to the next scene but
Alfredo has decided that he will do his Bishop character. Here the Spymonkey
storyline takes over, Cooped (the play Forbes has written) is lost and
we are now watching Alfredo’s desire to impress the audience with his Bishop
character, the childish rivalry between Alfredo and Udo and Forbes’ struggle to
take control. The way that Alfredo and Udo use their characters in order to
pursue their own objectives reminds us of the dual objective improvisations
discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Alfredo claims his Bishop is possessed in order
to strangle Udo, who counters this by saying, ‘You are possessed by the devil.
I will put the mark of Christ on you!’ and proceeding to cover his face in red
make-up. It is left to Forbes to control the situation.
Alfredo and Udo are not setting out to
deliberately destroy the play, as Cal asserted earlier in this essay, his
‘clowns try to help’ but they simply cannot conform to the conventions they
find themselves in – whether this is despite trying to conform or simply being
oblivious to the rules. And so we can say that, just as the fools surrounded by
non-fools (such as Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, or the ‘clown characters’
of many playwrights from Shakespeare to Brecht), through their encounter with
the real world, reveal to the audience the strangeness of the conventions of
reality, Spymonkey encounter a play and reveal to the audience the strangeness
of the conventions of the imitation of reality. Alfredo thinks the Bishop will
improve the show; he is blind to the fact that the Bishop would serve no
function to the development of the plot. What is interesting at the beginning
of this scene, however, is the moment when Aitor manages to make Toby corpse.
This moment reveals explicitly the third layer, the truth, which is that Toby,
Aitor, Stephan and Petra – not Forbes, Alfredo, Udo and Amanda – made this
show. In revealing this, it also reveals the truth that probably all the
‘mistakes’ and ‘spontaneous choices’ the clowns seem to have been making, were
in fact prepared meticulously by the cast.
Up until this point in the performance, the audience have been presented with two layers. The introduction to the play in which Forbes greets the audience and introduces his fellow players has served to frame the play itself as something made by these clowns. Therefore, when Aitor, not Alfredo, makes Toby, not Forbes, laugh onstage, does this expose the clown layer (the Spymonkey storyline) as an equally false reality to the Cooped storyline? Were the Spymonkey storyline populated by ‘actor characters’ who play the characters of the Cooped storyline, this may be the case and the moment between Aitor and Toby would reveal another illusive layer. In their connection to clown methodology, however, Spymonkey have not created characters but found their clowns, which are profoundly themselves. What they do may be rehearsed but who they are is genuine. The moment of corpsing, therefore, reveals not another layer of illusion, but another layer of folly in which Toby realises the stupidity of what they are doing onstage in front of all these people and, in fact, confirms that he really is a fool as opposed to acting like one.