In this third part of my retrospective reflections on recent work by London artist-activists concerned with the machinations of Big Oil, I want to consider Platform’s Oil City – a site-specific performance that tours small groups of participatinging audience members around parts of the City of London. Oil City was first staged in June this year as part of Artsadmin’s 2 Degrees festival of climate-change-related arts. These rather belated reflections are sparked in part by my having seen a very different piece of participatory theatre just last weekend, when I was in London for the symposium discussed in part 1 of this epic, 3-part blog entry…
Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man – a co-production with the National Theatre – is a massive, interactive spectacle taking place over four floors (though I think I only discovered three of them) of a disused building adjacent to Paddington Station. The place has been made over as a labyrinth of Hollywood-movie-themed spaces (producer’s offices, Western saloon, American high street, etc.), and there is an enormous cast of performers that you follow all over the building. It’s almost totally random motion – you make individual choices about where to go and what to see, who to tail, where to veer off… It’s a voyeur’s paradise, because every member of the audience is masked, so nobody can ‘see’ you, but you can get right in close to the action. Physically and viscerally it’s thrilling (some amazing close-up dance sequences, etc.), but plot-wise it’s pretty non-existent because you see the scenes – which are repeated in a looped sequence – in no particular order. And many of the scenes you don’t see at all. (At the curtain call, many of the performers taking their bows were completely new faces to me!) All of which means, in short, that it’s great fun but utterly without coherent narrative, content or any particular meaning beyond the thrill of the chase. One’s mind is not taxed in the least.
OK I’ll come back to this… But back to Oil City, which does engage the mind as well as the body. It was also a piece of particular personal interest to me for two reasons: (1) the piece’s origins can be traced directly back to a walk along a similar route that was first devised by Platform’s James Marriott and Mel Evans for the London meeting of our performance footprint network back in May 2011 (for a full, illustrated account of which, click here). In the image below, for example, my tour group is pictured moving along the same corridor between Liverpool Street Station and London’s RBS offices that was also a key stage in the earlier walk…
(The woman on the phone ahead of us is one of the performers – but the blend with the environment is such that everyone else who just happens to be there also becomes part of the mise en scene…)
(2) The second personal connection here is Mel herself, who very much ran with the idea of developing the earlier tour as a theatre piece. Mel was, back in the day, a student of mine at Glasgow University, and to direct the piece she also recruited a fellow former-student, freelance director Sam Rowe (the pair of them featured in a number of fondly-remembered shows I myself directed in Glasgow – e.g. they doubled as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in 2003). Leaving nostalgia aside, though, I want to focus here on the particulars of Oil City as a theatre piece… Because unlike the works focused on in the previous sections of this blog sequence (an audio tour and a conceptual art piece), Oil City draws quite openly on theatre conventions – and indeed on some of the conventions of participatory theatre established in recent years by companies such as Punchdrunk. Where the 2011 tour had James and Mel playing narrators who were essentially versions of themselves (as in storytelling or performance art), Oil City used three professional actors to multi-role in several different character parts each — as journalists, campaigners, oil industry employees, political fixers, etc.
Here’s one of the actors (sorry – I can’t find any record of their names) leading us out of Liverpool Street Station towards an escalator up to that RBS corridor. At this moment she was, if I recall correctly, playing a whistleblower who was trying to provide us with evidence of corporate malpractice …
This is a game of intrigue, with the audience cast as players… This engaging, entertaining format is used to introduce participants to some of the complex issues around the controversial attempts of oil corporations to drill in the Canadian tar sands (given the increasingly scarce resources elsewhere). This dangerous and environmentally destructive process also violates longstanding treaties over the territorial rights of First Nations peoples…. Hence, the actor pictured above later plays a First Nations activist who has come to London to bring the fight to the beating heart of the oil giants BP and Shell. (Incidentally, the choice of tar sands as topic marked another significant shift from the original 2011 tour, which was premised around the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.)
This doubling and trebling of roles by the actors no doubt arose in large part from budgetary limitations on the number of actors that could be hired… Unlike the resource-rich Punchdrunk, Platform’s is clearly a shoestring operation. And on the one hand, the multi-roling created a certain degree of confusion as to who exactly was playing what part when. But it also struck me that the the company made a playful virtue of necessity, by actively playing up these confusions as a way of highlighting the performance’s self-conscious theatricality. For example, during our initial car journey from the piece’s starting point at Toynbee Studios (HQ for the 2 Degrees festival) towards Liverpool Street, our audience group of four was informed by the driver – also the one male actor in the show – that we needed to keep an eye out for a certain untrustworthy oil executive… The actor was at this point playing a campaigning journalist who was enlisting our help in getting his ‘scoop’ – but the identifying photo that he showed us of this shady executive was a photograph of himself… The moment drew knowing smiles from his audience, and introduced a sense that the details of what was coming would — like all the best mystery plots — be somewhat blurry and confusing.
When I saw the same expositional device used in the Punchdrunk show (as we were escorted into the depths of the 4-storey building in a lift, the lift attendant showed us headshots of various stars and starlets we had to look out for), it occurred to me to wonder if Mel and Sam had drawn on Punchdrunk as an influence for Oil City… We are, after all, constantly being told by the press that Punchdrunk are influential… But where Punchdrunk used the photos simply as a signposting device, there was much more of a sense of knowing wit in the doubling-up used by Platform. And the overt, self-conscious theatricality thereby introduced also contrasted intriguingly with the concrete reality of the everyday London spaces we were moving through… (as opposed to the entirely fantastical, faked up sets used by Punchdrunk). Oil City pulled and pushed at the participant’s sense of what was “real” and what was “fictional”, in a way that the entirely hermetic Drowned Man never could.
This push-pull effect was also weirdly appropriate in relation to the issues being addressed by the “story”. My strongest memories of Oil City – as I finally write these reflections several months late – are of a kind of febrile confusion… a confusion that seemed to complement quite aptly the clearly very murky realities of Big Oil’s dealings with governments, lawyers, and community advocates. While I remember little of the fine detail recounted to us by the (fictive) characters, I did gain a clear and present sense that conversations being held, decisions being made, right here in the (real) City of London, were having very serious impacts in faraway Canadian territories…
Here is that same male actor I mentioned, playing the executive he had warned us about, at a cafe in the station complex… In this particular scene, the rules of the theatrical ‘game’ have suddenly changed: instead of being addressed and implicated as participants within the events themselves (“I need your help with this…”), we were suddenly treated as invisible flies on the wall – or rather invisible bums on the other seats around this table – as an off-the-record conversation occurred between these two execs.
This invisible audience premise is fundamental to Punchdrunk’s aesthetic, but again, they use it less interestingly… In The Drowned Man, we all wear masks, we are clearly delineated from the non-masked performers, and we never cross the line from viewing to interacting… In effect, the masks operate just as would a proscenium arch or a film camera, separating us from those who are ‘acting’, even though we are mixed in among them. The categorical distinction between ‘stage’ and ‘auditorium’ is thus maintained and actively policed (as I discovered on a couple of occasions when stewards prevented me crossing parts of the performing spaces they did not want me to). By contrast, Oil City again creates a productive kind of blurring… Take a look at this shot below, for example, taken just before our man on the left – in the picture above – arrived for his meeting…
As we sat waiting for the scene to begin, all the other scenes at other tables formed part of our mise en scene, creating a strangely blurred sense that all those other people you can see were also actors, and that they too might be involved in shady dealings of some sort… And who knows, maybe some of them were! The show induced a weirdly unsettling, weirdly exciting kind of paranoia for participant spectators (and I know it wasn’t just me that felt this, because the people I was travelling with made the same point!).
And here we are, again in hot pursuit of the woman in black, like the Private Eyes that the show had cast us as. The spaces and landscape around us changes, but the pursuit keeps up… And where Punchdrunk had spent who knows how much (some of it public money) to facilitate our movement between artificial spaces, Platform simply used what was already available to them for free… The City becomes a strangely heightened, theatrical space (which it already is, of course, in many respects!), and everyone in it becomes part of the intrigue… Looking back now, I find myself wondering how much more extraordinary Oil City might have been if it had even a decent-sized fraction of The Drowned Man‘s budget to throw around — if they had a cast anywhere close to the same size so that you really never were sure who was an actor and who was just a bystander… Equally, what might happen if the audience numbers could be scaled up, to bring many more people into the conversation…?
Here is our First Nations activist, leading us into the looming maw of a public space underneath one of the financial buildings — where (in the shot below) she finally confronts yet another character played by our male actor with documents that he is suitably alarmed to realise have come into her possession…
He wheels round to confront us, the spectators, uttering a stream of convenient denials and excuses… It’s the kind of performance we’ve seen all too often from politicians and others who have been caught with their hands in the till, or their trousers round their ankles… Of course in this instance we know full well it’s just an actor, playing a part, who will shortly melt back into the London crowd as this largely invisible, ephemeral performance disappears into memory… But we also know that there is a reality to the artifice here – that things somewhat like the things that we’ve witnessed have happened, perhaps are happening right now, in the very spaces we’ve been moving through…
What I’m talking about here, I guess, is reality. The best theatre is utterly real precisely by virtue of its explicit artifice. Oil City achieved this, with very limited resources, in a way that The Drowned Man (with all its money, hype and glamour) signally failed to. If only we could arrange for a reallocation of funding… But then this is also the point of Oil City, in terms of its content: we need to ask questions about where the money is going, and why, and to whose benefit.