One Man's Rules

In the bustling, crowded and hugely competitive world of Fringe theatre, standing out from the crowd is a daunting, near-impossible task.

No more starkly is this illustrated than if you take a walk down the Royal Mile during August. This is a world in which one positively expects to be accosted by dozens of thespians imploring you, screaming at you, to come and see their show. This is a world in which cheap conceits and gimmickry are all-to-often mistaken for creativity and experimentation. This is a world in which I once genuinely heard: “You should, like, totally come and see our show; it’s, like, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, only on, like, a bouncy castle!”

However, it is a remarkable trait of the Edinburgh Festival that genuine theatrical excellence is able to, and often does, rise to the surface. This has been the story of the thoughtful and unassuming playwright, Tim Crouch, a man who, since his debut play My Arm opened at the Traverse in 2003, has become renowned for his experimental, boundary-pushing work.

This year, Crouch brings his fourth “grown-up” production, The Author, to Edinburgh. It is a play that deals with issues surrounding violence and exploitation in the arts and the role of audience—in a way, the complicity of the audience—in that exploitation.

“The Author is the story of a play,” says Crouch, “what I would term an abusive play – abusive in every sense of the word. I, in The Author, play a playwright called Tim Crouch who has written that play and is responsible for rehearsing two actors into the play and in the process abuses them as well.

“What starts as a conversation about another play becomes broader and broader: about how we show the world, how we mediate the world and how we use the world, how we exploit the world to create art. It’s a highly critical play in many respects about how disconnected we have become as consumers of media from our responsibilities to the world. So we look at things, we’re happy to watch things on computer screens, on television screens, and we’re happy not to make a connection between ourselves and the things that we look at. And I feel very strongly that we should be more responsible.”

Crouch is explicit in noting that he has a real problem with the portrayal of violence in the arts. He argues that images we choose to look at, the art we choose to consume, is a reflection of our values as a society. And by consuming violent images, we are somehow endorsing the violence that is portrayed.

“I’m not coming over all Mary Whitehouse!” he says, laughing, “but one of the central questions in The Author is about the endemic representational acts of violence and abuse in our media. I have a problem with realistic theatrical representations of violence, not because I don’t think they should exist, but because I think they should be used intelligently. I think they should be used challengingly, that they should not be used lazily. When you think about some of the great works of film that have used violence, and often the violence is just outside the camera. Those are things that bring us in as opposed to just titillate our basest instincts.

“The Author is a play about live art, because it’s a play about a play, but also it connects to issues surrounding the internet, it connects to issues around the connection between what we choose to look at and what we do when we choose to look at something, what we buy into when we choose to look at something, what we endorse when we choose to look at something. And currently I think there is such a casual laziness about recognising our responsibilities as spectators.”

If grand, philosophical questions are a hallmark of Crouch’s work, so too is innovative use of space a central device in his plays. The Author is no different. Indeed, so enthusiastic is he about the staging of his production that it’s the first thing he wants to talk about.

“It’s unusual. There’s no performance space whatsoever. When the audience enter the Trav 2 they are confronted by two banks of seating facing each other with a one meter gap. They sit in those two banks and they are witness to each other, watching each other. They see each other seeing. And within the audience there are a number of performers who are as anonymous as the audience members. There is no action in the play, no physical action. A story is told but the most active thing that happens in the play is that the audience come in and the audience go out. That’s the pinnacle of the action.”

“So that’s unusual. There is no stage. And it’s been interesting talking to theatres that we’re touring to. They’ve found it quite difficult to get their heads around. They go: ‘Well, where are the actors?’ And we go: ‘Well, they’re sitting in the audience.’ So I’m sitting with audience members on either side of me and the other actors have audience members on either sides of them too. It’s kind of playful but it is also employed as a device to provoke the audience to consider their own position. We’re not putting up great big signposts for them in this play. ‘Look, the play has begun. Look, I’m a character. Look, the lights are going down and now its dark.’ It’s not like that. It reevaluates the rules, the traditional rules, of being in a theatre space.”

The AuthorTraverse Theatre6-29 Aug (not 9, 16, 23), times vary, £11-£17