Uninvited Guests and Theatre Arcadia: Sarah Gorman (Roehampton University) I am, in comparison to many people here, a relative new comer to the work of Uninvited Guests. I began following their work in 2003 whilst preparing to write about Offline for an edited collection of essays about contemporary European theatre. I ended up watching the show many times over, and I recall becoming seduced by the attention to minute detail and the compositional alacrity of a seemingly casual, “thrown-together” show. In this piece the company used found-text from internet chat rooms and, at first glance, the show seemed to revolve around the endless repetition of similar confessions of sexual desire, inhibition and perversion. Initially it was easy to dismiss the background music, the guitar amp, the costumes and the carpet as non-crucial elements, the content of the confessions appeared to hold the secret to the “preferred meaning” of the show. However, when I saw the piece in Ljubljana as part of the Mladi Levi festival in August 2003 I found myself foregrounding the importance of the ostensibly sparse set. The clatter of the low-tech cassette tapes and the nylon carpet sparked associations with my bedroom at my parents’ house and the taped, C90 soundtrack to my teenage years. The costumes, suddenly strange in the warm climate, spoke volumes about those wearing them, and the intensity of the exchanges between Richard Dufty and Jessica Hoffmann’s “characters” stood out in contrast with Jessica Marlowe’s silence and Thomas Keller’s aloof, solitary delivery. I realised that behind the casual, laconic veneer existed a carefully honed structure. Thinking back over the 3 different pieces I have now encountered, I find myself attempting to list the similarities and differences between the shows, and the importance of structure and composition repeatedly emerges, for me, as a key element of each piece. Whilst compiling my list, I found that any easy theorising about common themes and strategies within Uninvited Guests work was rendered impossible by their most recent piece. Watching It is How it Ought to Be (2006) at Battersea Arts Centre in May, it struck me that this was a radical departure, for the company, from a number of features. Firstly, it marked a move away from a largely confessional mode of presentation; secondly, a move away from a sparsely furnished theatre space; thirdly, a distancing of the customary preoccupation with new technology and popular culture and finally, a rejection of a kind of cynicism about what populist or popular discourses give us license to say or do. I was intrigued by the turn away from contemporary popular cultural discourses to an anachronistic literary genre, that of the pastoral. In comparing the three shows, I did come to find that there were structural and thematic similarities, but these occurred for me at the level of discourse analysis rather than in terms of content (if a crude distinction can be made between these elements). Whilst other experimental theatre companies such as Forced Entertainment and The Wooster Group invoke the discourses of theatricality and performance in their work, Uninvited Guests appear to interrogate the notion of discourse itself. By interrogating the linguistic idiosyncrasies of internet chat-room confession or the visual language of horror films, the company are exploring the function of popular cultural innovations; considering how and why generic conventions become established and normalised, asking how certain images, or certain pieces of jargon come to establish a form of semiotic artifice which is both playful and constitutive. They also transform, or make these discourses strange by transposing their idiosyncrasies into a theatrical setting. For example, in Offline, words designed only to be read on screen now form a quasi-dialogue; details of scenic composition redolent of a film treatment are realised as vignettes in Schlock (2004). The genres, or discourses, if we can call them that, of Internet chat-room conversation and schlock horror have been formed through repetition, and although they appear frivolous and “unserious”, they contain an established set of internal rules and assumptions. Although It is Like It Ought to Be appears to represent a radical shift in Uninvited Guests’ work away from popular culture, I want to argue that what endures, is a preoccupation with discourse itself. Offline and Schlock repeated and exploited the tropes of Internet chat and bloody images of horror in order to expose the artifice of those conventions. Similarly, It is Like… repeats and exploits the generic conventions of the pastoral form in order to demonstrate its limitations and, above all, ask what our need is to invent and repeat such linguistic or literary constructs. By drawing upon examples from Offline, Schlock and It is Like…, I want to propose that, despite the apparent differences, a shared compositional structure underlies each of the shows, and that the structure works to deconstruct and to reveal part, if not all, of the “grammatical structure” of each genre. Intrigued by the shift in content in It is Like…, I began to survey texts on the pastoral genre. Whereas Offline and Schlock appeared to allow for a caustic, cynical exploration of genres apparently invented to deal with repressed desires (for example writing about impersonal sex in Offline and repeating tales of gratuitous violence in Schlock), It is Like… appeared to give voice, in part, to an optimistic, joyful (if ‘plastic’ and tongue-in-cheek) celebration of all things rural. It struck me that a better understanding of the genre might help uncover the key to this particular piece. Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (1999), gives a useful introduction and overview, which offers three definitions. First, he states, pastoral refers to a historical form used in Augustan, Greek and Renaissance poetry and drama. Secondly, he cites a definition, which goes ‘beyond the artifice of the specific literary form’, pastoral can be ‘any literature that describes country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban’ (Gifford 1999: 2). He continues, ‘Here a pastoral is usually associated with a celebratory attitude towards what it describes, however superficially bleak it appears to be’ (Gifford 1999:2). Finally, Gifford draws attention to a more critical or pejorative use of the term, putting forward the example of a Greenpeace supporter who ‘might use the term as a criticism of a tree poem if it ignores the presence of pollution or the threat to urban trees from the city developer’ (Gifford 1999:2). According to Gifford, the emergence of ecocriticism (a practice concerned with environmental ethics and the interrelationship between human and non-human) has been partly responsible for the term “pastoral” being used in a pejorative sense. Indeed, a survey of the representation of nature in many classical (Theocrites), modernist (Eliot) and Romantic (Wordsworth) poems will provide examples of what we might consider today to be, ‘ideologically conservative’ representations. This survey might reveal a continued celebration of nature’s subordination under man; the association of feminine values with a savage, uncivilised landscape; the attempt to celebrate an inherent sense of Englishness, whilst ignoring the oppressive effects of British imperialism. Indeed, working with a knowledge of the discoveries of environmentalism, feminism and post-colonialism, it is difficult to see why an artist might choose to employ the pastoral genre, with anything other than deep irony, and yet we can see, in companies such as Deer Park, Lone Twin, and now Uninvited Guests, a desire to return to the pastoral as a celebration of rural environments. Gifford’s reading of pastoral may be guilty of a deadening, or flattening-out of language, but the analysis of the pastoral discourse does allow for a critical reappraisal of the inner logic and assumptions supporting what structuralists might term the “closed system” of the genre. A return to pastoral, albeit a pastiche of the pastoral, provides an opportunity for us to perform a linguistic and semiotic analysis, which is informed by what Gifford terms ‘a mature environmental aesthetics’. I suggested earlier that the work of Uninvited Guests was deconstructive in nature; I also made the distinction between Uninvited Guests and other contemporary experimental companies such as Forced Entertainment and The Wooster Group, who have been described as deconstructing “presence” and “theatricality”. I made this distinction in order to argue that this company are deconstructive in that they perform what we might call “discourse analyses” of their chosen genres, rather than deconstruct the form of theatre as they perform. I want to argue that each genre employed in the last three shows (chat-room argot; schlock horror and pastoral) has been employed in a fundamentally similar manner in order to act as an allegory for the human drive to create subcultures and specialist genres. In order to follow this argument we need to come to see the occupation of genres as a metaphorical occupation. In ostensibly discussing horror, repressed sexual desire and a retreat to the country, the company are actually talking about something else; these genres are what Jameson would term ‘stylistic masks’ appropriated in order to discuss the function of language itself. So far this reading would appear to amount to a post-structuralist reading of the work, a stance which holds that rather than being ‘part of the expressive function of language’, that metaphor is ‘actually one of the essential conditions of speech’ (Sarup 1993:47). Post-structuralists argue that ‘metaphor is a sort of rhetorical double-bind which states one thing but requires you to understand something different’ (Sarup 1993:47). Although many critics have now spoken out against the seeming dominance of post-structuralist analyses in contemporary criticism, it does seem a pertinent tool to use here, given the way that Uninvited Guests appear to deliberately choose to inhabit and interrogate different genres. Despite the disciplinary leap between the invention of a popular written language (in Offline); the invention of a low-budget filmic genre (in Schlock) and the invention of stories and songs about the countryside (in It is Like…), each of the genres contains an internal set of rules governing what can be said, which ideas can be entertained within this context. The internal system gives those employing the genre license to employ a kind of short-hand, a kind of subcultural bonhomie, allowing them to take a break from a more quotidian day to day set of rules and to entertain that which might appear otherwise improper or taboo. Madan Sarup argues that ‘the deconstructive procedure is to spot the point where a text covers up its grammatical structure’, where it reveals the hidden values and the privileging or erasing of different terms’ (Sarup 1993:50). In deconstructing a text or genre, it is possible to de-naturalise established value systems. Whilst deconstruction might prove valuable in order to reveal, for example, patriarchal, or imperialist hierarchies, it has also be recognised as a problematic form of critique as it needs to replicate an already conservative, or oppressive image or discourse, in order to critique it. I consider many of the more uncomfortable moments in Uninvited Guests work to occur when the company are doing exactly this, reciting or replicating gratuitously violent or sexualised language in order to draw attention to the governing structures of the quoted genre. In Offline I recall being surprised at how repulsed I felt by some of the explicit confessions describing sexual encounters, I recall Thomas relaying a chat-room confession about having sex in a plastic tunnel in a children’s park, another story about having sex with a girlfriend whilst she was menstruating. Although the show had begun with confessions of love, the tone had shifted as the figures on staged recited a litany of confessions about illicit teenage sex; adulterous sex; sexual encounters betraying best friends. I felt squeamish as Jessica and Richard repeated words such as “fingering”; “cum” and “fuck”, and also embarrassed at my own reaction, as if disappointed by my own latent conservatism. I admit, I always find it uncomfortable watching prolonged snogging, even on film or TV, but this was more than a vague discomfort; I think the revulsion came from hearing what I found to be crude words relentlessly repeated over and over again, and the incongruity of hearing them enter the public arena in spoken, rather than written form. I feel no such squeamishness in reading sexually explicit sexual confessions, I even feel impatient when I see that newspapers have coyly asterixed out key vowels in words such as “fuck”, but in performances such as Offline, or in Tim Etchell’s Starfucker ( 2001), for all my liberal pretensions, I find that the repetition of sexually graphic language when relayed ‘out loud’ in the live space of the theatre, has a distinct physiological effect upon me, I tend to feel sickened and a little debased. In Schlock, my discomfort again took me by surprise. I had watched company members use stage blood to create ominous pools of dark blood, and paint dramatic arterial jets on the Perspex screen without feeling any real sense of displeasure or discomfort. I had enjoyed watching the images of death and gore being “constructed” and had appreciated them for a sense of competence, irony and cleverness. I had listened to very detailed vignettes describing the moments leading up to an accidental death with the thrill of listening to a particularly scary, but titillating ghost story, they didn’t affect me in the way that I thought the company wanted them to affect me, I was not shocked or disturbed. The moment which really caused me physical discomfort was when Richard upturned a squeezy bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup and glugged the contents down his throat without stopping. Half of the bottle dripped down his chin and onto his already blood-covered torso. It was the sickly sweet smell of the ketchup and my imagining Richard ingesting such a large quantity of thick, coagulated sauce, which made me squirm and cover my eyes. I think I also held one hand over my stomach and the other over my mouth as I resisted the urge to gag myself. As with the example from Offline, I felt physically unnerved and sickened. My experience of discomfort in It is Like… was more difficult to identify. When thinking back about the performance, I mainly remember feeling delighted, charmed and buoyed-up. The world had been made a better place for me, and I felt warm inside. Whilst recognising the artifice and the cuteness as “cheesy”, I still found it pleasing to coo over the cute mechanical bunnies; to hear Richard tell Simone that he loved her and to hear repeated declarations of love relayed via the ‘sword of love’ and the ‘horse of love’ between otherwise anonymous audience members. I was thrilled by the companies’ exhortation to shout an uninhibited ‘yes!’ to the ‘flowers in the meadows/the plough in the field/the river that winds through the fields and the beasts that roam the forest’. The elements which caused me a sense of unease came from the construction of the female characters in the piece, from Simone’s apparent possession at the outset of the piece, to her topless foraging and animalistic movements during the darker, more ominous section of the piece. I also found it disturbing that the cloaked god-like figure (the horse-dog), with a horses head was represented by one of the other female characters. The transformation of these women stood in stark contrast to the careless rural idyll created elsewhere in the show. Simone’s possession, towards the beginning of the piece, stood as a harbinger for the darker forces which became manifest towards the end of the piece. During an early section of the piece Richard had invited her to join in an apparently harmless game of apple-bobbing at the staged country fair, only to begin to restrain her and force her head under water as she began to deliver an angry tirade. The violence of the restraint and the repeated soaking of the audience with the water soaked up by Simone’s hair presented a sudden glimpse of the potentially inhospitable countryside, of conservative values and suspicion regarding libidinal behaviour on the part of women. Later in the piece, as the lights dim and synthesized discordant music takes the place of live string and accordion medleys, the pliant, loving Simone is transformed again into a half-naked creature rocking on all fours, hovering over the apple-bobbing bucket, and dipping her head in and out of the water. Her torso is marked with the dirt of the forest, and she appears to be snorting and making gruff animalistic noises. Rather than read this image as a repetition of Simone’s previous possession, I read it as a repetition of the sign of women’s apparent proximity to nature, of her “natural” affinity with the base logic of the earth, rather than the rational civilised logic of man. Her second transformation also signalled to me as an ideologically conservative image which repeated repressive binary values. I am more uncertain about the nature of my discomfort about the cloaked horse-god figure, and consider that perhaps it is again a sense of ambivalence around this chaotic presence, who variously claims to be ‘the tired troops advancing…. pubescent girls in mini-skirts… asphalt round the dung-heap, steaming … two girls on roller skates … and ravens flying east’. The association of this apparently malevolent, ungenerous rural force and the form of the female performer beneath the cloak again made me sense that some connection was being made between nature and femininity. This force appeared to embody the less romantic, seedier, uncomfortable aspects of the rural and the urban. I consider that each of these moments of discomfort could be seen to point to a moment of excess signification, or a crisis in signification, through which something of the “grammatical structure” of each genre was revealed. Each moment of discomfort forced me to acknowledge something about the internal structures of the discourse being employed, and to acknowledge a moment at which an ostensibly harmless discourse became harmful. In Offline I was surprised by my apparent prudish response to sexually explicit language, and this appeared to mark the different values I hold for written and spoken English and my continued investment in the privacy and necessarily consensual nature of sexual encounters. The discourse of sexual confession created within the chat-room is permissible precisely because of its privacy and anonymity. It is apparently “harmless” when read by consenting adults in the privacy of their bedroom or office. The graphic descriptions are palatable when relayed through private words (as potentially with the work of de Sade or Anaïs Nin) but they signify as violent and abusive, they became potentially harmful when relayed verbally in a public context. For me, Uninvited Guests’ staging of the confessions caused a perceptible rupture in the rules of engagement with that particular discourse, the rules of engagement had been broken and it was this breach of etiquette which signalled as a site of potential harm. In Schlock I felt impervious to the gore and apparent trauma being staged before me, the obviously constructed nature of the images robbed them of any affect, however the smell and the proposition that Richard was experiencing genuine physical discomfort, as a result of ingesting a whole bottle of Heinz ketchup was genuinely disturbing and, in tandem with the smell of the sauce, and the noise of his laboured glugging, caused another direct physiological response. This transposition from the visual to the olfactory caused a rupture in the “rules” to which the piece appeared to be adhering up until that point. I thought that this moment of discomfort intelligently foregrounded how inured a media-savvy culture can be to images of extreme violence, of violence carried out against both real and fictional bodies. It is not until senses other than the visual and the aural are awakened that the real implications of the violence hit home. As a spectator I found it difficult to contemplate my responsibility towards either real or fictional victims as long as these images were contained within the visual discourse of schlock horror, as soon as they transgressed the generic rules, the terms of engagement had to be redefined. Finally, the example of female savagery in It is Like… rang warning bells as it signalled a problem within the otherwise idyllic pastoral environment being represented. As in patriarchal detective narratives of the 1950s, woman was signalled as “trouble”, as being responsible for rupture in order and tranquillity. Whilst participating in heterosexual courtship, the pastoral female is safe and contained, whilst giving in to libidinal urges she is figured as possessed, dangerous, as needing to be contained. I think that part of my discomfort came from the fact that, in this instance, Uninvited Guests run the danger of reiterating, rather than deconstructing this patriarchal assumption. The explicit acknowledgement of the ironic relationship to the genre noted in the publicity material is not necessarily enough to undo the potential harm of the image (and this is part of the “double–bind” of deconstructive signification). However, when read as a circumvention of the internal rules of the pastoral narrative, it is possible to understand the wider implications of the representation of women within this genre. The images of assertive, sexually desirous women transgress the discourse of the pastoral and signal as a site of potential harm. I am aware of that this hypothesis might seem rather too neatly sewn-up, that my selected examples, and attendant omissions are rather convenient. I consider this partly to be an occupational hazard (how can you make assertions about preferred meanings without being selective and partial?) and partly to be the result of my relying on my subjective, physiological response to each show to signal some kind of rupture. I realise that I am attempting to be precise about a subversion of the rules of each discourse, as if they can be scientifically measured, when relying upon an imprecise, irrational and subjective response. However, I consider my moments of discomfort to be a response caused by the structure of Uninvited Guests’ work. At a certain point in each piece, the company force their chosen frame of reference to an oppressive climax, they force a surfeit of signification and in so doing encourage the spectator to reconsider the value system upon which each discourse relies. Schlock and Offline in particular play with discourses which have been formed as a way of circumventing or challenging conventional “good taste”. They create an imaginary space for participants to immerse themselves in a discourse which permits gratuitous violence, or explicit sexual confession. The sudden excess of signification encourages the spectator to recognise the internal conventions as distasteful or extreme, and also to recognise that up until a moment ago, they had found them acceptable and palatable within the terms of that particular discourse. It is interesting to find oneself temporarily “forgetting” the prevailing climate of political correctness and believing that the citing of a particular “genre” (in the name of irony) gives a carnivalesque licence to images of sexual and physical violence. I would argue that this sense of first seduction into, and then estrangement from, convention allows Uninvited Guests to ask wider questions about language and discourse, to ask what the relationship might be between discourse and reality, to question the extent to which discourse mediates or produces reality. Elsewhere I have described Offline as a manifestation of the tendency to internalise the prevailing ideology, as a representation of the Western cultural subject’s tendency to “self-police” and to curb ones own freedom in relation to social convention and etiquette. I consider that this observation could also be used in relation to Schlock and It is Like…, each piece appears to grant both the audience and itself a certain license to say and do something which is beyond the realms of conventional thought or good taste (so, too sexually explicit, too violent, too kitsch and naïve) but also then to encourage the spectator to consider how readily they agree to these terms of reference. This is why I consider the pieces to be fundamentally about discourse, even as they appear to be about popular culture, or even folk culture. I stated previously that I consider Uninvited Guests to employ deconstructive strategies in an unusual way, in that, as theatre-makers, they do not appear to cite the theatre or theatricality as one of the discourses under scrutiny. The material practices are not cited or brought into question, and, although employing direct address, and using their real names, the performers do not appear to step in and out of character as might other deconstructive theatre practices. This aspect of their work makes me wonder how crucial this particular medium is to the work, could this critique take place as effectively on video, or as a piece of web-art? On reflection, I think that the company rely upon and exploit the shared experience of duration which theatre provides. The audience in a way are a captive audience (they self-police and remind themselves it would be rude to leave) and so they are available to experience the effect of accumulated meanings and the effect of constant repetition. So, in this sense, I consider that the company exploit the communal time-based nature of theatre. Their interrogation of the hidden imperatives and values within discourse could be seen to be an ethical practice, an insistence that all discourse is ideological. However, does their failure to directly refer to the means of production underway, to cite the terms of the theatrical discourse mean that the company could be seen to interrogate many discourses, apart from that of theatre? I do not have any easy answers to this question, but I am confident that the company work in full cognisance of critical practices such as post-colonialism, feminism and environmentalism, that they are aware of the lasting effects of British cultural imperialism, and so I would hope to see audiences extrapolating for themselves an analysis of the theatrical discourse, out of the playful, but astute deconstructions of discourse which the company perform before them.
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