CHRONICLING CHRONICLE: II

Having been a drama student in Liverpool during the 80s, and a male to boot on a regular basis, I found myself – in the words of Howard the Duck – trapped in a world I never made. It would be hard to call it a time of innocence. The Toxteth riots and the miners’ strike were symbols of a northern fury not merely misunderstood, but actually inflamed by the government in London. Poverty was rife, as was theft; it may seem counter-intuitive but somehow a lack of possessions made you more vulnerable to burglary, not less. Along once-thriving roads like Smithdown, the only growth industry was in boarding up shop windows. “Security by EXPO” was more prevalent than “La’s” graffiti.

Meanwhile, the life of a student – particularly one in the liberal arts – wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either. The advent of AIDS along with a post-feminist insistence that all men were potential rapists where even the most casual appreciation of a woman’s attractiveness marked you out a sexist pig – a misogynistic neanderthal who deserved to be deprived of his knackers courtesy of the nearest scythe. The resultant combination meant that twenty years after the sexual revolution on campus, your average first year saw about as much action as a Benedictine monk. At least the monk had the brandy to sustain him.

However, all this paled into comparison beside the drama of the time. The dawn of Channel 4 had led to a swathe of earnest, heartfelt and tedious state of the nation plays and programmes. The aggression of the left over low pay and slum-like housing conditions was giving way to liberal half-formed theories about Sandinistas and the importance of drinking Nicaraguan coffee. There wasn’t much fun being had, and any that was available had to be right on – as the phrase went - or not at all.

Of course, this is a generalisation and a sweeping one at that. There was Berkoff with his visceral visions of urban hell, studded with the poetry of the gutter; there was Godber’s Hull Truck Company, looking to find drama and humour in such northern delights as Rugby League and the local nightclub; there was Willy Russell, single-handedly packing out the Everyman with his tale of mid-life redemption, “Shirley Valentine”, performed by the author himself after his original Shirley – Noreen Kershaw – fell too ill to perform. But my abiding memories of the time are of a huge amount of preaching to the converted in trades union halls and Labour clubs, an awful lot of Brecht, and a lot of awful Brecht.*

Those notable exceptions above notwithstanding, theatre in the 80s could be a drab and soul-crushing affair, more akin to a lecture than an entertainment. Yet despite this, I couldn’t quite embrace the hedonistic surrealism of the site-specific or street theatre events that followed and became almost an essential part of the music festival scene of the late 90s onwards. While I admired the efforts to take performance to non-theatrical venues, the drama somehow got lost on the way. Here was ritual a’plenty, but without substance. There had to be a ground somewhere between these two extremes that didn’t smack of compromise.

Then I recalled my participation in a debate on The Guardian’s website over the nature of theatre and what it should be doing in times of austerity and politi...

I know - my eyes are glazing over, too. Tell you what, why don’t I just attach it? We’ll call it Exhibit A and for those of you who don’t want to guess, I’m entered under the nom d’internet of “yeruncle” (calling myself ‘Bob’ was both a blind alley and a bad pun that seemed like a good idea at the time). Grab yourself a cuppa and marvel at how much shit can be expelled by arty liberals in one morning. Particularly yeruncle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/jul/16/cuts-theatre-economics

Recovered?

Leaving aside that I was wrong in a number of ways about “Black Watch” - more of that later – there were some aspects of that digital conversation that have gone on to shape this current, early, incarnation of Chronicle Theatre.

Firstly, that theatre is way too expensive.

Secondly, I do a lot of talking out of my arse.

Thirdly, there was a challenge out there to marry journalistic endeavour to theatrical voices and not come up with something dull but worthy.

Given that I was a theatrical with an NCTJ qualification in magazine journalism (don’t go looking for any articles – I may be trained but I’m lazy), it seemed as though I was particularly, if not uniquely, qualified to meet this challenge. But how?

First stop, verbatim theatre and “Black Watch”.

*Strangely, there wasn’t a vile amount of Weill.

CHRONICLING CHRONICLE: I

Memory is an unreliable historian. Despite it’s only having been a week or since the last performance of “No Particular Place To Go”, this is no less true than if I were trying to record events from a year or a decade ago. How quickly we contrive to mythologize or edit the events of our lives to give them a significance or even a structure that they would not naturally possess is almost a thing of wonder in itself. However, having failed to make concurrent notes, I shall have to rely upon that unreliable historian when trying to record matter and not myth.

So to the beginning, and even now that’s not true because there is a prologue to all this but I’ll try to explain it as we go along or we’ll never get started. My constant partner in theatrical crime James Weisz and I were in a rut. Various plans but no direction. Mock-celebrity tributes to dead film stars, sketch shows, two-man plays: we were active, certainly, but formless. The only attribute these activities seemed to have in common was that we two were involved. It was James who complained about this first. Strange, as I thought he was happiest amidst this frantic confusion.

There are certain local companies I admire as companies, even if I disagree with some of their methodologies. One, for example, has created an identity for itself by staging short plays from unknown writers that range in tone from the surreal to the hilarious to the poignant. It has a high quality threshold. However, due to the economics of fringe theatre, the authors have often gone unpaid (or relatively lowly paid) for their input. Meanwhile, promising troupes of actors have often disassociated themselves from the company following disputes over money.

This situation may be changing, with the company performing more devised and commissioned pieces, but the fact remains that – no matter what its internal/teething/financial problems - the company stands for something. When people come to its performances, they know what they are getting. As a result, it sells to packed-out houses in Brighton and Edinburgh, has been nominated for various prestigious awards, and is developing its portfolio.

Naturally, I wanted some (if not all) of that.

Taking an overall view of the work James and I had orchestrated over the past few years, there was one small thread running through it all. Small and simple: we were telling stories. This was glaringly obvious when it came to the plays, less so with the other activities. Yet the tribute to Dennis Hopper had been an opportunity to indulge the various mythologies of Hollywood’s bad boy, while the best of our sketches were narratives in themselves.

As an inveterate, some might say intolerable, punster I naturally ran through the various definitions of story-telling within my precious Chambers Thesaurus. This may not be strictly true; it may have been the Roget or just the on-line version. Again memory’s lack of reliability, but the principle remains the same: I was seeking synonyms.

Story n. account, ancedote (sic), article, chronicle…

I don’t feel the need to take you through "novel, plot, recital..." and the rest. Chronicle had a pleasing ring to it. I think it’s the consonants: a symmetry of three and three. Thus was Chronicle Theatre born.

Now all I needed to do was work out what that meant.